Monday, January 26, 2009

Ubumodems - Configure USB ADSL modems on Ubuntu Linux

UbuDSL - an ADSL connection configuration tool.
UbuDSL helps you configure and manage your ADSL connection. It supports only USB ADSL modems such as Sagem F@st 800, Thomson SpeedTouch 330, ZTE ZXDSL 852 and other which are supported by the ueagle-atm, speedtch, cxacru and unicorn-usb-eth drivers. It supports openSUSE, Ubuntu & Kubuntu Distributions & this guide is done for the Kubuntu users. Installation & configuration for the other distribution will be the same.

1st Step : Download UbuDsl installation Package from the link below.

Download UbuDsl

Below is the demonstrated USB ADSL modem issued by Srilanka Telecom.




2nd Step : Installing

Double click on the downloaded package.



Afterwords following window will pop-up. Just click the Install Package button on that window.


The package manager will now install the UbuDsl Applet.


3rd Step : After Installing, following window will appear. It's the UbuDsl applet configuration window.



Click next. Then you will have to type in your login name & your login password. Choose your country & your ISP name. Don't check or uncheck other options. Default settings will work fine.


Click next again & the applet will instruct you to plug the modem in.


Then the applet will ask you to insert & select your installation volume. In that case just put in your Linux installation CD (in my case Kubuntu 8.10 CD) & click OK.


Then the applet will detect the modem & configure it.

Finally UbuDsl will finish configuring your modem & will attempt to establish connection. It is recommended to reboot the computer after that.


If everything went fine, after rebboting the computer UbuDsl will establish the connection immedialely & you now can surf the web from your favorite web browser contained in your linux distribution.

4th Step : Troubleshooting

If you have any troubles in configuration or in using UbuDSL, first, have a look at the FAQs below

1.Modem is synchronizing but there is no connection.

In this case you have to try to unplug the modem, wait a few seconds, plug the modem in and wait to modem synchronize. Then try to connect. If it still doesn’t work, please generate log and send it at ubudsl(at)gmail(dot)com with problem description.

2. Modem is synchronizied,connection is established but I can’t browse websites.
a) Probably this is a fault of the DNS servers. Try to use OpenDNS servers. for that perform these commands

sudo rm -rf /etc/resolv.conf
sudo /opt/ubudsl/ubudsl --set-opendns


b) If you use Ubuntu and your browser is Firefox, the web browser may be run in the offline mode. To switch to the online mode, simply uncheck the Work Offline position in the File menu.


If you have a problem that is not described here, write about it at mail(dot)dilan(at)gmail(dot)com

or u can always get online help by connecting to the following IRC channels on chat.Freenode.net.
The channels are : #ubuntu & #kubuntu
People in those channels will always help you with this.