Saturday, November 8, 2008

Connecting A USB Mobile with AIRTEL GPRS connection to Internet in Linux

Though the newer versions of Linux come with a GUI configuration utility (A NetworkManagerApplet) to configure a USB compatible phone to connect to the Internet still, in many contemporary as well as older versions do not have a graphical utility. So, in this post we try to tweak a USB phone by connecting it to the Internet. The Major part of this how-to is inspired from Dave's Blog (http://davestechsupport.com/blog/2008/02/28/how-to-connect-linux-to-your-cellular-internet/) and some more tweaks are also made later on based on heuristics.

The steps to be followed are as under:

1. edit /etc/wvdial.conf in your favourite text editor and make these changes:

[Dialer Defaults]
Init1 = AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","airtelgprs.com"
Modem Type = USB Modem
Phone = *99#
Password = pass
Username = user
Modem = /dev/ttyACM0
Baud = 460800

2. In the 2'nd line Init1 shows the initialization string for your phone. airtelgprs.com will be the acceess point of you are using Airtel GPRS. For other carriers kindly contact your Internet Service Providor. The second last option Modem is the USB device, which may be traced by supplying the command dmesg | grep "ACM"

3. issue the command # wvdial and note down the DNS addressses. Now just disconnect by pressing Ctrl + C or somthing similar.

4. now some extra tweakings, despite doing these changes I was unable to browse the Internet, and heuristic worked here:

edit the file /etc/resolv.conf and append it with obtained Name servers, something like this:

search xxx.yyy.ppp.qqq
nameserver xxx.yyy.ppp.qqq
nameserver xxx.yyy.ppp.abc

5. Now it is almost ready to surf, just open a console and issue command # wvdial

6. Open Firefox and go to File -> Uncheck on Work Offilne option.

Now it is ready to!

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