Umtsmon

From openSUSE

Overview

Umtsmon is a program designed to ease the use of GPRS / UMTS / HSDPA (3G mobile)data cards on Linux. It has its own project page at sourceforge], there is also a mailinglist to contact the developers. Umtsmon is intended to be mostly standalone, with little dependencies and to work with most available distributions. Therefore it is missing a deep desktop integration into e.g. KDE or GNOME, since this would increase the number of dependencies a lot.

Packages (not only for openSUSE!)

Umtsmon is delivered with openSUSE since version 10.2. Since there is continuous development going on, it is often advisable to install a newer package, since old bugs might already be fixed and new hardware might be supported. To make it easier to install recent version, Stefan Seyfried, the SUSE umtsmon package maintainer tries to provide recent packages for as many distributions as easily possible in his openSUSE BuildService home project. Packages are right now available for

• Fedora 8
• Mandriva 2007
• SUSE Linux Enterprise 10
• SUSE Linux 10.1
• openSUSE 10.2
• openSUSE 10.3
• openSUSE Factory (should have a quite recent version anyway)

Note that there are two versions in Stefan's home: the latest stable version (0.7 as of this writing) and the latest "unstable", curren CVS version (0.7.90.20080124 as of this writing). You can see the date of the CVS checkout in the version number - 24th of January in this case), so that you can see how recent this version is. There might be some patches on top of that - usually pending patches sent to the mailing list and not yet applied upstream.

Installation in 10.3

To install UMTSmon under openSuSE 10.3, you can use the Build Service in http://software.opensuse.org/search and search for umtsmon.

Click in "1-Click install" on the version from the home:seife-project and follow the instructions.

Manual Installation

Just search for the package as before on http://software.opensuse.org/search, stating the distribution you want to find packages for, then download the package to your machine and install it with rpm.

Other prerequisites

You need your user to be a member of the “uucp” group. To accomplish this, call yast -> Security and Users -> User Management, then select the user you want, edit his details, and add group "uucp" ownership to him.

Using Umtsmon

Starting Umtsmon For The First Time

The first time, it's better if you invoke /usr/bin/umtsmon from a console (terminal program), so you can see if anything goes wrong. UMTSmon tries to detect any incorrection in accessing devices and commands, so it will probably throw you a message box like this one. You can fix the problems as suggested, and proceed.

To fix the problems, you need root access to the computer. You should type his password.

Creating A Shortcut On The Desktop

Now create a desktop icon with your right mouse button (pointing at the desktop), and select “Create New -> Link to Application...”

Select your preferred icon, and that's it. You can now invoke UMTSmon, and it should directly open without the need of a terminal console.

Other Configuration

After starting UMTSmon, it will probably ask you for a pin, if the GSM card has that enabled. Select “Connection” from the menu, then “Manage Profiles", and set your preferences: APN, username and password.

You can see the most common APN's in http://www.reqwireless.com/apns.html. After creating a profile, it's just a matter of pressing “Connect”, and you should be accessing the Internet. UMTSmon allows also to use many profiles, as well as send SMS messages right from the GUI.