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Showing posts from January, 2010

My first linux contribution is a disaster

So I recently submitted a patch to the NetworkManager component: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=607731  - but it turns out to be a duplicate because this problem was addressed in https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=600779 - by default Bugzilla doesn't seem to include 'resolved' defects in the search results. You have to go to advanced search and select all statuses . So, if my patch wasn't needed, and this issue has been resolved, then why doesn't the source code in trunk have this change? Bug 600779 mentions that service providers is deprecated, but by what? Ubuntu 9.10 still uses it, because when I edited /usr/share/mobile-broadband-provider-info/serviceproviders.xml it worked fine for me. If service providers is deprecated, then why isn't there something on the homepage? Bugzilla doesn't seem to report which source files were changed in a bug - something I quite like in JIRA. See comment #1 : VirginInternet would still be used for teth

Week in Review - 2010-03

Its been a good week. I got my Virgin Mobile Broadband Prepaid 3G modem working, and learnt a lot in the process, and actually contributed to the GNOME project: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=607731 As part of this, I installed Pidgin so I could join the IRC channel and talk to developers, but I haven't yet figured out how to view the history for a channel - so I can see what happened while I was offline... It does surprise me though, that the database for mobile broadband providers is specific to the window manager (GNOME) instead of being a system level thing. I'm sure there are good reasons, and it probably doesn't matter, but what do the KDE (and others) users do? Define it all over again? Worse than that though is that Virgin don't seem to make the APN easily available. I found it by searching the web, and finding it in forums, but why isn't it in the FAQ on a Virgin site? I didn't anticipate how much I'd enjoy having access to the internet

Ubuntu, Virgin Mobile Internet Pre-paid (in Sydney), and the Huaweie160e

I recently bought a Virgin Mobile Broadband (Australia) PrePaid USB modem - a Huawei e160e. I activated it over the phone, and when I plugged it in to my Dell Inspiron 1525 running Ubuntu 9.10, I could see that it was connected to the network (this modem flashes a blue light every 3 seconds when connected to the mobile network). But, try as I might, I couldn't get it connected. Every time I tried, it would just disconnect. Looking in the system logs, I'd see: Jan  6 12:42:57 paul-laptop pppd[2846]: Plugin /usr/lib/pppd/2.4.4/nm-pppd-plugin.so loaded. Jan  6 12:42:57 paul-laptop pppd[2846]: pppd 2.4.5 started by root, uid 0 Jan  6 12:42:57 paul-laptop pppd[2846]: Using interface ppp0 Jan  6 12:42:57 paul-laptop pppd[2846]: Connect: ppp0 <--> /dev/ttyUSB0 Jan  6 12:42:57 paul-laptop pppd[2846]: CHAP authentication succeeded Jan  6 12:42:57 paul-laptop pppd[2846]: CHAP authentication succeeded Jan  6 12:43:06 paul-laptop pppd[2846]: Modem hangup Jan  6 12:43:06 pa