Community Matters

The Moblin development team has been working very hard over the last few months and finally released the first public alpha of Moblin 2. You can get images (very useful hybrid ones that boot from both CD and USB stick as well as KVM or VMware images) at the Moblin website. If you want to play with the Moblin 2 image on your netbook, please be aware that these images are optimized for Atom processor based systems (as they heavily rely on SSE3 for performance reasons – so technically they’d run on Core 2 Duo processor based systems as well, I guess).

We’ve tested them on the Acer Aspire One, the EeePC 901 and 1000 and the Dell Mini 9. They should run on most of the other Atom processor based Netbooks and we’d be very interested to hear about success (or problem) reports from those.

This USB 3G EVDO stick is available as Novatel Wireless Ovation U727. Mine is from Sprint, but there also used to be a version from Verizon (but I can’t find it on their site right now).

Sprint states that it supports Linux (which is part of why I got it). Sprint even provides instructions how to install it under Linux. That’s great, except that these instructions are wrong, as are most of the hints you can find online when googling for U727 and Linux.

Sprint tells you to use the usbserial module and give it the specific vendor and product codes for the devices as options in order to tie it to usbserial; something like modprobe usbserial vendor=0x1410 product=0x4010. This is bogus in the first place as the product code for the newer versions of the U727 has changed to 0x5100. But even then, while it might work (depending on how your Linux distribution is set up) it limits your data rate to about 500kbit/s – Sprint even documents that limitation!

If you keep looking, you’ll find several posts online that instead suggest to patch the AirPrime driver in the Linux kernel – only that one was removed in 2.6.26. So with a current Linux distribution (and soon most people will have upgraded to something with a newer kernel) neither of these solutions really works.

Instead, the USB Serial Option driver is now the correct driver to use. But even though this is supposed to work “out of the box” on a recent Ubuntu or Fedora system, I did find myself having to manually load the module before plugging in the stick. Simply run sudo modprobe option from a terminal window before connecting the U727 and things will work smoothly; after a moment NetworkManager realizes that there now is a Mobile Broadband connection available. It tends to populate things correctly (all default settings plus #777 as the number to call), but it’s always worth to double check.

I’ve been very happy with the U727 so far. Very decent data rates (often more than 1Mbit/s) and acceptable latency, given that this is a wireless WAN connection. The one major downside is that there is no signal strength indication under Linux – that would certainly be useful when trying to figure out the best position for the little antenna. Oh and don’t forget to connect the stick at least once on a Windows or Mac OS system before using it under Linux so that those drivers can correctly program your account information into the flash on board.