Greetings and Salutations…

It has been a challenging couple of weeks here, and one of the more annoying ones has been with the aircard we connect to the Internet with. It is a UMW190 from Verizon, and is the latest and greatest thing. However, it is also a composite device that wakes up when plugged in as a CDROM, and, has to be switched to work as a modem. Of course, it is SO new that Linux has little or no support for this. However after far too many days poking through data dumps and scratching my head, I found an annoyingly simple way to deal with the problem. It turns out that there is a checkbox in the controller software (running, alas, under Windows), that allows one to TURN OFF the CDROM function! Once that is done, Linux recognizes it as a modem upon plugging it in…and it is trivial to configure it.

I really need to push on and find out what it takes to mode switch it via software, but, it is such a relief to be back on the air that I am going to bask in the joy of that for a little bit before trying to puzzle out the USB communications.