European Wafaa

With the release of openSUSE 11.0, NetworkManager 0.7 was included by default. This wasn't the official release of NM0.7, but it was stable enough for inclusion. Thank you for taking the decision oh Nuremberg Gods - it works a charm!! This is thanks to tambeti and the rest of the Mobile computing team in NUE, they spent a lot of time and effort ensuring that NM in openSUSE works as it should.

As people may remember I had a lot of issues getting 3G to work with openSUSE 10.3. All of the problems have disappeared now, as under GNOME (I haven't tried with KDE yet) it really does work out of the box

I have a Vodafone branded Option GT 3G+ PCMCIA card. To get the thing to work is litteraly three steps - one less than on windows:

-1. Put the card into the slot

-2. Left click the NM applet



-3. Select the "Auto GSM network connection" option

Voila you are now connected to your mobile provider.



A lovely icon of a tower with radio waves is displayed to ensure you are aware of the network type. It is not tied to this specific model of 3G modem, I have heard that the new USB modems work a charm too. If you aren't sure about you modem, plug it in and check dmesg</>, you should see something similar to:

pccard: CardBus card inserted into slot 0
nozomi 0000:03:00.0: Init, new card found
PCI: Enabling device 0000:03:00.0 (0000 -> 0002)
ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:03:00.0[A] -> GSI 18 (level, low) -> IRQ 18
nozomi 0000:03:00.0: Card type is: 2048
nozomi 0000:03:00.0: Version of card: 3
nozomi 0000:03:00.0: Initialization OK!
nozomi 0000:03:00.0: Device READY!

My only niggle with this is that NM currently doesn't report on you data usage, so if you happen to have a pre-arranged plan (say GBP10 for 1GB) you can't see how much you have left. This isn't a major issue for me, but would be a "nice to have" feature. Once again big kudos to all the guys and gals that made this happen, this was one point that a lot of people at LRL UK mentioned and some of the Ubuntu faithful even installed openSUSE 11.0 just for this fact alone (supposedly until the next bunty release, but I'm sure they won't go back).