August 4, 2010 by

o2 Broadband E1752 Dongle Working on Ubuntu 10.04

I originally posted this article on my old personal blog around this time last year for Ubuntu 9.1 as I was having problems getting my O2 mobile Broadband E1752 Dongle to work. I certainly upgraded to Ubuntu 10.04, which I had heard solved the problem but I still couldn’t get it to work, so looked up my own old tutorial and it worked.

HowTo


All information supplied here is not offical and you use it at your own risk

Ok here is how I got my o2 E1752 Modem working in Ubuntu.

  1. Put your sim in your dongle and plug into a usb port.
  2. For the E1752 model the network manger applet will not pop up unlike other dongles. The reason for this is somthing to do with the device also acting as a storage device
  3. So what you need to do is use usb_modeswitch which can be downloaded in a .deb file here (found it somewhere can’t remember) which makes it easier to install.
  4. Then as root user find the file usb_modeswitch.conf and add the below code to the bottom of the file ( big thanks to cocoa’s post here for that code)
  5. ########################################################
# Huawei E1752
#
# Contributor: 

DefaultVendor=  0x12d1
DefaultProduct= 0x1446

TargetVendor=	0x12d1
TargetProduct=	0x1001

MessageEndpoint=	0x01

MessageContent=	"55534243000000000000000000000011060000000000000000000000000000"
  6. Then go into your network manger and go to moible broadband tab.
  7. Click add and it will start a wizard, your country should be already Ireland
  8. Select your pay plan, mines o2 contract, then click next and then finish
  9. Then click on the new connect you just made and edit it.
  10. There should be default stuff in there, leave all that, but in the pin field place your own pin and click apply
  11. Once this is all done, open a terminal window and run this command
  12. sudo usb_modeswitch
  13. It will prompt for your system password, once the script does its thing the network manager icon should start doing somthing
  14. if not left click on it and select the connection you setup
  15. Now you should be connected to the world wide web


Well I hope that helps someone, because I know I was searching for ages trying to get it working. I only got it working yesterday evening and I still haven’t got around to getting use_modeswitch to run on startup so everytime you restart your computer you will have to run the sudo usb_modeswitch command in the terminal.


About the Author

Ciarán McCann

Flax Project Founder - Ciarán McCann is an extremely passionate and motivated programmer who has been programming for about 4 years now. Currently attending Carlow I.T studying computer games development. He has experience in many different programming languages, markup languages and general technologies. His role in the Flax Project is as a blogger/Web Designer and Flax Engine programmer. Please excuse any bad grammar/spelling, I am a bit on the Dyslexic side. Follow me on Twitter for info on what I am working on.

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20 Comments

  1. Claudio Antonio Valentin Solis August 12, 2010

    Starting from scratch using command line on native Xandros EEEPC, E1552 TELE2 Croatia. The usb.modeswitch.conf file does not appear to be right in /etc, still the command runs normally. Not much progress made, but here I am hearkening to the rest.

    If it takes a trip to Cork to get Linux working in the EU, well…

  2. smoke September 21, 2010

    Thanx, man! You have saved my day:)

  3. Al Butler October 10, 2010

    Hey,

    Firstly thanks a million. Got it up and running. Any update on getting it to work at start up?

    • Ciáran McCann October 11, 2010

      Good to hear. Ok I will write a script for it soon. I.E in the next week or so. Busy with college atm, but the script should be very simple anyway though i don’t know bash to well.

      • Al Butler October 11, 2010

        Thats great, will check back in a couple of weeks. I’m pretty clueless about scripting. Getting this dongle working was about the limit of abilities. looking forward to the update.

        • Ciáran McCann October 11, 2010

          What version of Ubuntu are you using? I would say Ubuntu 10.10 would fix the problem as many people reported the problem fixed in Ubuntu 10.04, though didn’t work for me.

  4. rpr October 23, 2010

    I tried the your procedure on a Ubuntu 10.04 Desktop and noticed two problems:

    After adding the usb_modeswitch package (v. 1.1.0) I tried to run it and got the following:

    $ sudo usb_modeswitch
    Error: Could not find file /etc/usb-modeswitch.conf

    This shows the right path of the config file (you have a typo in “usb_modeswitch.conf”).

    Another typo is in the following line of the config file:
    TargetProdct=
    It should be
    TargetProduct=

    Please, fix your typos.

    — rpr.

  5. niall December 19, 2010

    Hey,
    thanks for the tutorial, however i am new to linux and am getting the following error msg when i try to install the .deb file:

    e@ubuntu:~/ununtuDebfile$ sudo dpkg -i usb-modeswitch_097_i386.deb
    [sudo] password for e:
    dpkg: error processing usb-modeswitch_097_i386.deb (–install):
    package architecture (i386) does not match system (amd64)
    Errors were encountered while processing:
    usb-modeswitch_097_i386.deb

    any ideas how to proceed? much appreciated..

    • Ciáran McCann December 20, 2010

      The .deb file I have hosted is for 32-bit architecture. Your system seems to be 64-bit. You will have to find the 64-bit version, I can’t remember where I found the 32-bit version so I am not much help, sorry.

  6. Darko November 16, 2011

    Works on 90.4 without problems.
    Thanks

  7. Liam O'S December 6, 2011

    For any amd64 users(Like myself) out there, it should suffice to connect to the internet and run “sudo apt-get install usb-modeswitch”, as opposed to looking for and manually downloading the .deb from somewhere.

    Also, I’m still stuck on EDGE and GRPS, but I’m not sure if that’s just because the reception here is rubbish.

  8. john henry March 9, 2012

    trying to set up o2 broadband dongle.
    i followed all the instructions here and this is the error message i get back.
    every time i click on the mobile broadband in network all it says is gsm disconected

    this is driving me nuts can you help?

    Looking for target devices …
    No devices in target mode or class found
    Looking for default devices …
    No default device found. Is it connected? Bye.

    • Liam O'S March 9, 2012

      It’s probably not related to the network you’re attempting to connect to, but you could try setting the modem to connect to 3G/2G only, as this might help(It did for me, but I wasn’t being disconnected immediately each time): http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=11659708#post11659708

      The same thing(GSM Disconnected) happens to me often enough, but in my case it’s due entirely to O2 being unable to provide good, consistent service.

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