Comment 215 for bug 868034

Hi Sleepy John and others,

Since people still seem to have problems I thought I should chime in and share some of my experiences.

I had problems with connecting my E220 on 11.10 oneiric using MM 0.5-1ubuntu1 after upgrading the modem firmware to 11.117.10.02.00. (Don't remember what firmware version I had before the upgrade.)

I found a simple workaround that allowed me to connect reliably with ModemManager (detailed in duplicate bug #932824):
Prevent MM to probe /dev/ttyUSB1 by starting the command 'cat /dev/ttyUSB1' before MM starts its probing.

The updated version of MM currently in oneiric (which is supposed to fix this bug?), 0.5-1ubuntu1.1, does not work for me, but my workaround still works.

To test if you have the same problem as I have, you can try the following:
- Make sure the modem is physically disconnected.
- Open a terminal and run the command 'while true; do cat /dev/ttyUSB1; sleep 1; done'
(Before the modem is connected you will see messages like 'cat: /dev/ttyUSB1: No such file or directory' once every second. After the modem is connected and initialized you will see messages from the modem, such as ^BOOT:59866241,0,0,0,6 ^MODE:5,5 ^RSSI:27 and others.)
- Connect the modem to your computer.
- Connect using modem manager as usual.
Note: After ModemManager is done with its probing you can abort the cat /dev/ttyUSB1 command.

If this workaround works for you, you might want to try the "ports" branch of ModemManager which Aleksander Morgado mentioned in comment #145 (with more info available in the comments before and after). I've been using the ports branch since February and it has been working perfectly all the time.