After my experience with Zain’s WiMAX, I didn’t think I’d be using their service again. But Zain gave me a 21Mbps dongle (The Huawei E367) for free as to see how much better the new service is and I thought I might as well try it. I’ll be writing on my experience with the service in a separate post inshalla.
I’m I used to be a big Ubuntu fan and been using it as my primary desktop since 2007 (Not anymore), and Linux compatibility has always been absent in the mobile Internet world. I wasn’t gonna switch my primary OS just to use a USB dongle.
After plugging it in nothing happened, didn’t see a notice on the screen, no pop-pups or anything to show that something happened. After a quick lsusb I found this:
Bus 002 Device 005: ID 12d1:14ac Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd.
Kudos Huawei on showing us Linux users some love. Zain gets extra points for this choice.
Ok let’s get this bad boy configured. I got the settings from Zain’s Windows application. The following was done on Ubuntu 10.10, other distributions might vary.
- If the dongle was unplugged when you booted your computer, restart Network Manager
sudo service network-manager restart
, wait a few seconds, then right click the Network Manager icon and choose “Edit Connections…” - Go to the “Mobile Broadband” tab and click “Add” (You will not see “Zain Jordan” on your screen)
- The following screen will show up, if you didn’t restart Network Manager you will not see the Huawei modem, click “Forward”
- Choose “United States” then click “Forward”, don’t bother looking for Jordan, you won’t find it
- Choose “I can’t find my provider and I wish to enter it manually”, then enter any name you desire, I chose “Zain Jordan”
- Choose “My plan is not listed…” and for “Selected plan APN (Access Point Name)” enter “zain”, all lower case letters, without the quotes, then click “Forward”
- Click “Apply”
- You’re all set, to connect, left click on your Network Manager icon and choose your connection name