I’m a big Ubuntu fan and been using it as my primary desktop since 2007, and Linux compatibility has always been absent in the mobile Internet world. I wasn’t gonna switch my primary OS just to use a USB dongle.

After plugging it in nothing happened, didn’t see a notice on the screen, no pop-pups or anything to show that something happened. After a quick lsusb I found this:

Bus 002 Device 005: ID 12d1:14ac Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd.

Kudos Huawei on showing us Linux users some love. Zain gets extra points for this choice.

Ok let’s get this bad boy configured. I got the settings from Zain’s Windows application. The following was done on Ubuntu 10.10, other distributions might vary.

1) If the dongle was unplugged when you booted your computer, restart Network Manager (sudo service network-manager restart), wait a few seconds, then right click the Network Manager icon and choose “Edit Connections…”

2) Go to the “Mobile Broadband” tab and click “Add” (You will not see “Zain Jordan” on your screen)
3) The following screen will show up, if you didn’t restart Network Manager you will not see the Huawei modem, click “Forward”
4) Choose “United States” then click “Forward”, don’t bother looking for Jordan, you won’t find it
5) Choose “I can’t find my provider and I wish to enter it manually”, then enter any name you desire, I chose “Zain Jordan”
6) Choose “My plan is not listed…” and for “Selected plan APN (Access Point Name)” enter “zain”, all lower case letters, without the quotes, then click “Forward”
7) Click “Apply”
8 ) The following window appears, don’t change anything except “Username” and “Password”, set them to “Zain”, all lower case except for the Z, then click on “Apply”
9) You’re all set, to connect, left click on your Network Manager icon and choose your connection name
If you face any issues, just remove the dongle, reconnect, then restart Network Manager.

So far it appears the sound and flash issues have been fixed. Empathy seems to have gotten some improvements. Most noticeable are the fact it now saves the window position of the contact list, and gives you an indication when the person you’re chatting with on Google Talk is typing something on the keyboard.

If you hate the new window button placement, like I do, here’s how to fix it:

1. Open gconf-editor
2. Got to /apps/metacity/general
3. Change “button_layout” to “menu:minimize,maximize,close”

Today when I rebooted to my Windows installation which I very rarely do, I noticed that browsing under Windows feels much faster than under Ubuntu. After booting back to Ubuntu I noticed the “looking up domain.tld” part was taking a lot of time, which seemed a little odd.

Anyways, after some googling I found out that Debian enables IPv6 by default and uses that before and uses it before IPv4. A quick remedy was:

sudo vi /etc/modprobe.d/bad_list

#Add this line
alias net-pf-10 off

After which you should reboot your system. Now browsing feels much faster. To speed it up a little I installed a local caching DNS server which works like a charm. A quick HOWTO can be found here

Hope this helps.

Anyways, I have a Creative Audigy 2 card since I’m not a fan of software mixing under Linux, which is connected to an old creative 4.1 set. Since I don’t have any space I hooked only the front speakers and use the rear channels with a headset. After upgrading to Hardy I couldn’t get the headset to work. I just found the solution on the Ubuntu forums and thought I should document.

The new Ubuntu uses PulseAudio as it’s default sound engine, you can set volume levels for each application separately which is cool if you ask me. PulseAudio uses 2 channels by default. All you have to do is change:

; default-sample-channels = 2

To:

 default-sample-channels = 6

In /etc/pulse/daemon.conf, then restart gdm and you’re done