How to activate your HP UMTS card

After starting last week (only) one time Windows on my HP Compaq 2710p the internal UMTS card (HP HS2300 HSDPA Broadband Wireless module) stopped working under Linux again. And as Seife already pointed out: there is no way to activate the card from Linux (at least with kernel version 2.6.26) or the bios. I found today some time to search for a solution since several people asked me how to reactivate the card and since there are also bugreports with this problem.

Seife gave me the hint that may the hp-wmi kernel module, which will be part of 2.6.27, could provide a way to enable/disable the card. And it does. Currently the module don't get loaded automatically, you have to load it manually (modprobe hp-wmi). As soon as you load the module the UMTS card gets enabled, also if deactivated under windows before. Since the module handle the card as WWAN I assume also CDMA cards from HP would be handled the same way.

With hp-wmi the killswitch now enable/disable the WLAN, Bluetooth and the WWAN module automatically. But the user can switch the state also via sysfs. To disable for example the WWAN device you have to do this:

1. go to /sys/class/rf-kill
2. find the rfkill device of the WWAN module (grep wwan */name)
3. use 'echo 1 > rfkill3/state' to activate or 'echo 0 > rfkill3/state' to deactivate the device

I've added a kmp package (hp-wmi-kmp) for openSUSE 11.0 to my buildservice repo. Currently there is no kmp for factory but I guess a 2.6.27 kernel will be available soon (or use the kernel from here).

Tech Tags: Packaging UMTS hs2300

Fixing UMTSmon Sierra Wireless port detection

Yesterday I tried the first time to run UMTSmon on a HP Compaq 2710p TabletPC with a HP HS2300 HSDPA Broadband Wireless module (which is a Sierra Wireless). Unfortunately I couldn't unlock the SIM card with the correct PIN, while it worked under Windows and on a HP Compaq 2510p which has the same UMTS card.

With some hints/help from Seife I found out that the ttyUSB* ports for PPP and AT are twisted (compared to the 2510p). Since the cards in both machines have the same USB vendor and product id UMTSmon can't differ between both cases.

To solve this problem I added some code to UMTSmon to identify the PPP port from the output of the ATI command. The answer of the PPP port contains 'APP1\n'. This allows for Sierra Wireless cards with two ttyUSB ports to find always the correct port. You can find the patch on the UMTSmon mailing list or here.

Tech Tags: Patches UMTSmon

Hacking umtsmon

After I had a beer with Klaas van Gend (the UMTSmon developer) and some members of the UUGN (that's from Seife: "umtsmon user group Nuremberg") two weeks ago, I hacked a little on UMTSmon. 

Here what I did:

• added support to sort the content of QTable objects of the info dialog (bug #1616485) [1]
• fixed tabstop order for some widgets [2][3]
• reduce the really annoying flickering of the LCD widget in the main window, by use QWidget::setPaletteBackgroundPixmap() instead of QLabel::setPixmap() to draw the background image [4]

There are some ideas left to improve UMTSmon, some really nice features, we will see if and when I find the time to implement them ...

Tech Tags: Patches