[ltp] WWAN: X60 suse 10.2 advice please...

[Theodore Tso]

On Sun, Feb 24, 2008 at 08:56:56AM +0100, David Bremner wrote:
> 
> I just bought a pre-paid sim, disabled the PIN (you can use a pin, but
> it is more hassle), and configured ppp. You need to find out the
> password for your particular provider.  There are many people
> documenting this process on the web.  The tricky part was knowing that
> the card would work in Linux. In addition to random googling, it helps
> that Sierra Wireless talks about Linux support on their web site.

The problem is that setting up the pppd chat scripts is *just*
complicated enough that most casual users have a huge amount of
problems setting it up, but it's not quite complicated enough for
someone to think about packaging it, soliciting contributions for the
different chat script (which typically are slightly different for each
provider) and maybe putting a nice GUI in front of it so that newbie
users who only understand how to use Windows-style control panel could
just click and pull down their Country, Type of connection (i.e., GSM
data via Bluetooth, EVDO ervice, dialup modem etc.), ISP provider, and
then have the appropriate configuration scripts in /etc/ppp/peers set
up automatically.

If anyone has ever seen the very simple bluetooth GSM setup that the
Palm Pilot TX or T5 has, that's what we really need.

So maybe someone on this list would take this as a challenge; there is
a real need for someone to offer to set up a configuration framework
for pppd for GSM and EVDO services, collect scripts, and then create a
package which desktop distributions could pick up and use to make life
totally turnkey for Linux users.  Or, maybe this would be a good
Google Summer of Code project.

Any interested takers?  :-)

						- Ted