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Well, the USB mobile broadband dongle from ‘3′ finally arrived. I ordered this online on 21st Dec, admittedly not the best time to expect prompt deliveries, but I ordered other items from Hong Kong & UK over the same period which were delivered quicker than something from within Australia – why is that?

A 2003 IBM r40e is not a high-end laptop, but it is reliable, and will handle just about anything you need in the way of mobile computing. This unit was relatively cheap in 2003 when I bought it, only AUD$1,400.00. I bought a few extras for it over time to extend it’s capabilities such as a Minitar 802.1b wireless PCMCIA card, and a 3 port USB 2.0 PCMCIA card.

Last year I was finally able to rid the ‘craptop’ of it’s default Windows XP Home OS, replacing it with Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope. After trying many Linux variations over the years, Jaunty was the first to actually run everything, and after installing ndiswrapper to contain the ‘windows’ wireless drivers for the Mintar card, wireless connections to my home network are faultless with networking available as soon as the desktop has loaded. I also recently tried 9.10 Karmic Koala, but graphics support seemed broken for the IBM, so I re-installed Jaunty (note: Karmic works great on my desktop PC).

After seeing a friends Toshiba laptop connect to the internet using a Virgin brand USB Broadband dongle running from a live Jaunty CD, I knew Ubuntu had got their wireless support RIGHT. So I got a Huawei E1756 USB dongle from 3 (free on a $29.00  3GB/mth plan). Of course setting it up was a bit tricky as all providers only supply instructions for Windows or Mac systems, and are completely ignorant of how to get them working on a Linux system – it’s not that difficult though.

Just shove the USB dongle into a port (USB 1.1 or 2.0), and within a few seconds it has connected to 3’s Australian network, but it won’t browse the web … yet. Next right click on the network icon in the panel and select ‘edit connections’; go to the Mobile Broadband tab, select the connection and choose edit. Delete the default username and password (single character), then apply. Go to the Authentication  settings and de-select everything except CHAP and apply, then in IPv4 tab change from ‘(Automatic PPP) addresses only’ to ‘(Automatic PPP)’ and apply – close the settings dialogue window and let the device re-connect and then the system can browse the web etc … easy enough.

So now I have a 2003 IBM r40e ‘craptop’ with 16MB ATI Mobility Radeon graphics, 512 MB RAM and a 40GB drive running on Linux with faultless wireless networking at home and mobile broadband when out & about. The only thing left to get working is ‘Dial-up Networking’ which is a real headache as the internal modems are designed strictly for Windows, and getting them to work under Linux is difficult, but not impossible, and is something I’ll get around to later – for the moment it works fine at home and when mobile.

Sometime in the next week I will have delivery of a new Samsung Ultra Touch mobile phone with it’s AMOLED screen, but that will be another story. (update – phone arrived and my initial review is here)