Monday 15 February 2010

Give me my internet - part 7

- In which Vodafone cause pain to WIN -

Days and days have passed since the nice man from Vodafone called me up and promised to have a mobile broadband dongle delivered in 24 hours. A wee note slipped through my door of Friday, letting me know that they tried to deliver it, but failed, so I called the number on the card and arrange to pick up the dongle from a depot somewhere in darkest Park Royal.

I have it now before me, plugged into my Acer Aspire One netbook with Ubuntu running.

It blinks at me.

It taunts me.

It does not connect me to the internet, instead I must sneakily use my attractive young ladyfriend's net connection to find out how to get this damned thing to work.

Most people use Windows for their computing, it has a 92% market share. Mac has a 5.16% market share and Linux (upon which Ubuntu is based) has a 1% market share. The Vodafone dongle comes with Windows and Mac drivers on it. But for Ubuntu you have to get online, and via helpful posts from GreenHuges we discover the existence of Betavine, Vodafone's secret open-source software research and development facility. Further clicking and ploughing gets me to the page with instructions for getting it to work on Ubuntu Linux.

I got the Vodafone Mobile Connect application all right, but it doesn't find the K3675 dongle I've got plugged in to the right side of my netbook.

I'm not quite sure what information I can type in to get it recognised, It asks for "Device type:" and only gives me the option of Serial, this dongle is USB right, so that ain't gonna work.

Then "Data port device", "Control port device" and "Speed connection:" I got no idea.

Damn you Vodafone, why why why can't I get online?

Can't anyone help me?

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