[needs packaging] usbmodeswitch a 'must have' for 3G card owners

[Simone Tolotti]

Binary package hint: network-manager

From package description:
Several new USB devices have their proprietary Windows drivers onboard,
especially WAN dongles. When plugged in for the first time, they act
like a flash storage and start installing the driver from there. If
the driver is already installed, the storage device vanishes and
a new device, such as an USB modem, shows up. This is called the
"ZeroCD" feature.

On Debian, this is not needed, since the driver is included as a
Linux kernel module, such as "usbserial". However, the device still
shows up as "usb-storage" by default. usb-modeswitch solves that
issue by sending the command which actually performs the switching
of the device from "usb-storage" to "usbserial

You could find package in Pmarti's PPA:
https://launchpad.net/~pmarti/+archive/ppa

[Simone Tolotti (simontol)]

The package was included in OpenSUSE from 11.0.
The .deb file from Pmarti's PPA is missing some essential files that I've found in OpenSUSE .rpm and attached here.

[Simone Tolotti (simontol)]

Perl script to build udev rules from usb_modeswitch.conf

[Simone Tolotti (simontol)]

resulting udev rules

[Simone Tolotti (simontol)]

In Jaunty we have udev-extras that works well with these kind of devices.
I hope it will be installed by default when Jaunty will be released.