Baltix

  1. Bug #408555
  2. Comment #26

Comment 26 for bug 408555

Revision history for this message
MisterW (ian-warrilow) wrote : Re: ZTE MF636 3G modem cannot used in Karmic

Don't know if I can help here, but I have been doing some tests to see if my modem ( ZTE MF627 ) will work on 9.10 BEFORE I upgrade my Netbook from 9.04.

The story so far:-
I initially tried the 9.10 Live CD on the netbook and had the problem whereby the modem disconnects after about 7 minutes. Not wanting to mess up my working netbook, I then set about running 9.10 in a virtual machine ( on my desktop ) with all updates applied and still got the disconnects. I even tried the latest versions from https://launchpad.net/~network-manager/+archive/trunk, no difference!.
So then I started to investigate the forums for more information about the problem and it seems as though the consensus is that its something to do with the Unsolicited messages from the ZTE modems. Ah, I thought, on my netbook I actually use the application that came on the dongle ( yes a Linux version of the Windows software from 3 UK ) to manage the connection, rather than Network Manager since it gives me SMS facilities,and other useful stuff.
So I installed that on my 9.10 system and it couldn't see the dongle, yes that reminded me on 9.04 I had to stop NM managing the modem by changing nm-probe-modem-capabilites rules to comment out probing the option driver, so how do I do that on 9.10 I thought!. I obviously needed somehow to stop the new modem-manager probing it, eventually I just tried removing modem-manager ( with synaptic ) and sure enough my 3UK software now worked and could see the modem, and guess what , no more disconnects!!!
Ok, so I now did a bit more testing and discovered that without modem-manager installed the modem doesn't disconnect but install modem-manager and withing a few minutes, with the modem just idle, then i get a usb disconnect.
I have attached syslog output to show both the log with modem-manager installed and the one without.
I hope this may help and if there is anything else useful I can do then please let me know. Meanwhile I've downloaded the source for modem-manager and will investigate further...