My little brother bought himself this fancy netbook (it’s okay I guess, only the keyboard takes getting used to). A few days after he bought it, he told me he wanted something different on it than the shipped Windows XP.
At first, I favored a normal Ubuntu 9.10 Desktop. While thats okay, it simply isn’t the right thing for a netbook. Why ? For example, if the programs bar is larger than the vertical desktop resolution, it gets kinda tiring to work with this thing.
Took me (and him) a while to notice that, but in the end I put the Netbook Remix of Karmic on this sweet little thing. Only trouble he had, was that while everything worked out of the box (even the Digital Motion Camera at the top end of the screen), his UMTS didn’t. That’s kinda shitty, since he bought this thing, in order to get online, even if he is at a hotel without actual internet connection (that is no DSL or LAN connectivity).
He already bothered the guys at his local T-Mobile shop, which told him he had to send it in to Samsung for repairs, since they don’t do warranty claims (which iirc they have to do, according to the HGB). Anyway, he sent the box my way, for me to take a look at it first, to avoid paying 70€ for a damn quotation for the repair of the defect UMTS modem.
Turns out (as so often), it was just a simple software bug. The guy over at aptgetupdate, was kind enough to document the steps necessary to install a nightly build of NetworkManager (which Karmic uses to connect to any kind of network), which fixes this issue. As a proof, I’m writing this here blog post via the UMTS connection of the netbook!
For myself, here are the exact steps, in case I ever need to repeat them:
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cat << EOF | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/nm-nightly.list deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/network-manager/trunk/ubuntu karmic main EOF sudo apt-key adv --keyserver=wwwkeys.de.pgp.net --recv-key 248DD1EEBC8EBFE8 sudo aptitude update; sudo aptitude full-upgrade sudo service network-manager restart |
That’s it, that enables UMTS connections again.