Sunday, September 26, 2010

Using Micromax BSNL 3G Modem on Ubuntu 10.04.

While doing my new job at Jharsuguda I am also introducing people to Ubuntu Linux and many people are using it booting from USB stick. BSNL provides Micromax USB modem for net connection and I had specific request from one person yesterday to help him set it up on Ubuntu. I brought his modem home and tested it as following.

While googling for this modem I discovered that usb_modeswitch was necessary to detect it as modem instead of mass storage device. I downloaded the latest version of usb-modeswitch and usb-modeswitch-data from Debian repositories. Then I proceeded as  follows:


When I plugged in the Modem it got mounted as a CD. I got its vendor and product ID (thro lsusb) and unmounted it:

$ lsusb
Bus 002 Device 004: ID 1c9e:f000
$ eject /dev/sr1

I found the configuration file for ID 1c9e:f000 in /etc/usb_modeswitch.d/
Since I did not want the configuration on my machine I simply used it:
$ sudo usb_modeswitch -c /etc/usb_modeswitch.d/1c9e:f000

The modeswitch reported success I got the new ID for the device:
$ lsusb
Bus 002 Device 005: ID 1c9e:9605


I inserted the driver thro:
sudo modprobe usbserial vendor=0x1c9e product=0x9605

and the Network Manager detected it as BSNL Mobile Broadband device using the same set up which I use for the Mobile.

There is a wonderful script Sakis 3G for doing all this automatically.

Update on 12th May 2012: I have posted today about using this modem on Ubuntu 12.04 and it is entirely different. Click here to read.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

You're great sir, ji. You solve my problem in a second. You're great.......
I'm your student from right now.

Kamalakar Agashe said...

You are welcome.

Kamalakar Agashe said...

Download links are already there in the main post. For usb-modeswitch you need to scroll down to the table with heading "Download usb-modeswitch" and click on applicable Architecture for your machine e.g. if your machine has intel chip and you are using 32 bit version of Ubuntu click on i386. For usb-modeswitch-data just click on server nearest to you. For installation just click on usb-modeswitch-data .deb and then on usb-modeswitch .deb file.

Air India direct flight to San Fransisco has flown through China today.

 My sister in law left for San Fransisco by AI 173 flight which flows over North Pole. I tracked that flight on flightstats.com till it land...