In the past, I have used the Option Globetrotter PCMCIA 3g card, one of the
nozomi-based 3G cards, Nokia N70, and Nokia E61 for internet access on
Mandriva, and it usually worked without incident (the 3g card well supported
by drakconnect, the phones required some editing of ifcfg-files in the past).

I recently got a Vodafone E220 USB 3G modem, and there were some issues
getting it working on 2008.1 (which sometimes requires the huaweiAktBbo
utility to be run), however on the 2.6.26 kernel in cooker it works fine.

However, Vodafone has provided a linux utility similar to the one shipped on
the USB storage on the device for Mac OS X and Windows, available at
https://forge.betavine.net/projects/vodafonemobilec/ . It is a python-twisted
based application which runs as a tray application, allowing you to easily set
up new 3g connections (with hardware detection, hardware-specific settings,
network-specific settings etc.), and support for reading SMS's from the modem.

It doesn't work out-the-box on Mandriva, an OS plugin is required. I have one
that works (attached), but I have also packaged the software. Upstream has a
rather long name for the package (vodafone-mobile-connect-card-driver-for-
linux-2.0.beta1.i386.rpm), so I have packaged it as 'vmc' (with relevant
provides/obsoletes).

I will send the OS plugin upstream, but it may be more convenient to have it
in contrib as well, so I will upload it (assuming there are no issues) to
contrib and backports for contrib).

The remaining issues:

1)
I haven't looked at the installer versions of the software, but I suspect that
they ship some binary utilities (such as the huaweiAktBbo, icon_switch etc.
that are available in the contrib directory in the source package). So far, I
packaged the huaweiAtkBbo utility (from
http://www.kanoistika.sk/bobovsky/archiv/umts/) in a standalone package, and
added a Suggests on this package in vmc (for %mdkversion <= 200900).

Since the vmc package is noarch, I would prefer not to ship the utilities in
the vmc package, but I don't see much point in separate packages for each
device's workaround utility (they normally consist of one source file and
result in one binary and one udev rule).


2)
The vmc software uses wvdial for dialing, and it seems that the requirement is
that the user running vmc needs write access to /etc/pp/pap-secrets,
/etc/ppp/chap-secrets, and /etc/ppp/peers. If the user does not have write
access, vmc puts up a warning (suggesting that the user should be added to the
'daemon' group, and that the relevant files should be writeable by the daemon
group), and exits.


Suggestions ? Comments?

Regards,
Buchan