[tlug] HOWTO: Emobile D11LC on Linux

["Ian Heafer" <spaceturnip@example.com>]

Hi All,

  It took a little work but I finally got online using my D11LC. Figured
I'd share what I learned just in case anyone is else is having trouble. 
I got it up and working in Arch, but I doubt that this process would be
too different in other distros.

- Getting Linux to recognize the modem

I've seen a few reports that Linux will see the D11LC as a modem right off
the bat when you plug it in.  That wasn't the case for me.  I tried in
Arch, Debian Lenny, Ubuntu Hardy, and Fedora 9 and in all of them it shows
up as a USB flash stick.

To get it to show up as a modem you need usb_modeswitch.  There may or may
not be a package for it in your distros repo, for Arch its in the AUR.
After installing usb_modeswitch edit /etc/usb_modeswitch.conf and comment
out everything but the settings for the Alcatel OT-X020.  After running
usb_modeswitch you'll see the correct vendor and product ids when you run
lsusb.  usb_modeswitch needs to be run every time the modem is plugged in,
but this is easy to automate using udev rules.

usbserial is the module you need to get the D11LC working, but you need to
pass the vendor and product IDs in when you load the module for it to pick
it up:

modprobe usbserial vendor=0x1c9e product=0x6061

if you look a dmesg you'll see that /dev/ttyUSB0-2 have been created.


- Making the connection

I used wvdial to set up the ppp connection.  I started with the conf file
created when you run wvdialconf and made a few changes.  My
/etc/wvdial.conf is as follows:

[Dialer Defaults]
Init2 = ATS0=0
Modem Type = Analog Modem
Phone = *99***1#
ISDN = 0
Username = em
Init1 = ATZ
Password = em
Modem = /dev/ttyUSB0
Baud = 460800
Stupid Mode = on

The phone, username, and password are the ones from the e-mobile manual. 
I changed the baud and init2 strings based on what I found at
http://nlweb.iii.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~iwase/tips/fc6emobile.html  I'm not really
sure if init2 needed to change but wvdialconf set the baud to 9600.  I
found you need stupid mode on to force the ppp connection to start right
after you connect, if you don't have that, wvdial times out after it
connects waiting for a login prompt.

I needed to edit /etc/ppp/ip-up to copy /etc/ppp/resolv.conf to
/etc/resolv.conf

I also needed to load the ppp_generic module before I could make a ppp
connection, but that may just be an arch thing.

In my short time using it is seems to work well enough, The only other
things I'd like to figure out are if there is a way to see the signal
strength and amount of data transferred like the windows and mac software
does. (As an aside, I believe E-mobile's literature says that the D11LC
only works with intel macs, but while I was playing around I plugged it
into my old PPC iBook and got it working so there is support for PPC macs)
 Hope all this will be of use to someone.

Ian