Cognitive Consonance

If you have mobile Internet via E220 and E620 Huawei dongles (Vodafone in Europe uses a lot of E620s and Three in the UK seems to have E220s at least), the new Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) is bound to have some problems. The modem in the dongle won’t work (it will instead load the driver for the small memory stick disk that is attached). Note that this is strictly not an Ubuntu problem, it is a Linux kernel problem and probably other distributions will be affected as long as they have recent kernels.

How to solve this? Two options:

1. Install the kernel offered here. This will load the driver for the memory stick AND the modem one. Good enough. Some computers might have a problem with this. For instance, a version previously offered was not able to recognize my touchpad. It this works for you, it is probably the best solution.
2. Do this. The problem with this one is that it is very tricky, especially is Ubuntu tries to automount the disk (which it does). Do like this:
   1. Do the rmmod before installing the dongle. It should either remove the driver or, most probably say it is not loaded – both are good. If it is loaded this means that is is in use. If you cannot find what is making it being loaded then you are stuffed.
   2. Now the tricky (and stinky) part: Connect the dongle and start issuing, on the command line lots of rmmod. The module will load, you are trying to unload it before the automount kicks in. You will notice that most rmmods will say that the module is not loaded, but then one will say that the module was removed. For some reason the module is loaded twice, so you have to see the removal twice (most of the times).
   3. If the automount kicks in before you do rmmod then remove the dongle do rmmod and repeat the steps above.
   4. Do the modprobe

A less stinky solution (this one stinks as hell) might be to disable automount, but then legitimate uses for the automount (memory sticks and such) would be problematic. If you know of a better one, feel free to comment here or give a pointer…

OK, now were are done.

Well, not really. When establishing a connection sometimes Ubuntu (this is probably just a Karmic problem, not related with the kernel) does not pick up the DNS info. So you connect, but cannot use the connection. Just disconnect and reconnect. You might need to do this more than once, but it will eventually pick the DNS info.

Hope this helps.

As of this moment (this will change in the future), I would suggest some care in installing the new Ubuntu release, especially on newbie computers that depend on Mobile Internet. The shipped kernel has a bug with some USB dongles: It mounts the small SSD drive on the dongle, instead of making the modem available. This means that, when you connect the dongle there will be no Internet. If you are a geek, the problem is easy to correct, but for normal users (wasn’t one of the points of Ubuntu to make free software easily available to normal users?) it will be a bad experience.

Furthermore, after the problem above is corrected, many times is fails to get the DNS info on connection.

These are both old problems, that have been solved in the past and have re-emerged.

How serious is this? Most Vodafone dongles (Vodafone is a very big pan-European mobile operator) that I know off show this problem.

How Ubuntu Q&A let this one pass, let alone mark this bug as only of “medium” importance baffles me. The number of normal users that this has the potential to impact is substantially high.