AirCard580 howto in FC4

I sent this to our rep at ACS and thought others on the list might find
it helpful or useful. I did find out that within the net 1-2 years they
are going to be collaborating with Cellular One and this card so that a
user will have access in the lower 48 as well. I also found out that
they are hoping that within the next year, the card will reach anywhere
their cell service reaches. I wonder how long it will be until these are
built into laptops?

Jon

I am using FC4(FedoraCore4) using kernel version 2.6.12-1.1398_FC4
and the card was literally plug and play for me. Other Linux Distros may
vary but here is a quick howto on getting the card working.

1. Insert the card into the pcmcia slot, it should be detected as a USB
hub in dmesg or in your /var/log/messages log file.

The vendorID and the productID are as follows:

vendor=0x1199
product=0x0112
(Those are zeros and not capital O's for both vendor and product)

2. Insert the module by issuing this command:

modprobe usbserial vendor=0x1199 product=0x0112

The above I had to do to insert the module into my running kernel.

3. If you don't have 'ttyUSB0' already in your /dev file you will need
to create it like so:

mknod /dev/ttyUSB0 c 188 0 <--again a zero for both USB0 and the last 0

If you do have it in there already it will tell you that it already
exists, so no harm done if it's already there. Mine was already there so
I got a message stating that.

At this point the card is set up and recognized by FC4. Next we need to
configure PPP to dial the ACS network. Use whatever program you are
comfortable with to set it up, I used Kppp because I had it and it was
easy to use. If you don't have that app look around in your distro for a
nice gui to configure a PPP connection. Otherwise, use the below program
from the command line to set it up.

# If you don't have Kppp or any other GUI type modem setup program you
can use wvdialconf instead

A program that should be on most Linux distro's by default would be
wvdialconf located in /usr/bin/wvdialconf. You would use it like so:

/usr/bin/wvdialconf /etc/wvdial.conf

The above will walk you through setting up a PPP connection to use with
the card. Once that has been done, you can start the dial process by
issuing this command:

/usr/bin/wvdial

It will look for the /etc/wvdial.conf file that you created using the
/usr/bin/wvdialconf command that we used above.

# Configure PPP

You will want to configure PPP to connect like so:
Dial #777
Use PAP authentication
User = 7 digit phone number i.e. 5551234@acsalaska
Password = 7 digit phone number i.e. 5551234

At this point you should be able to hit the connect button if you used a
GUI app or type /usr/bin/wvdial if you used the command line program and
you should now be connected.

It is a very cool card and I was getting 46KB while at Apple's website
while downloading quicktime. I used it from Muldoon to my house at Lake
Otis and Dowling and never had the signal drop with a speed of between
10-16KB.

Jon
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Received on Thu Aug 11 19:44:34 2005