Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 109671
RFE: Need to support USB ADSL modems
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:10:33 EST
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 Galeon/1.2.7 (X11; Linux i686; U;) Gecko/20030131 Description of problem: The utility should be extended to support USB-based ADSL modems. USB-based ADSL modems are popular and cheap, several popular ones are supported by Linux. But the redhat-config-network utility lets you on your own and doesn't help at all with them. It only supports ethernet-based ADSL modems. But given that they are more expensive and that many people have USB-based modems provided by their ISP not supporting USB-based modems is a serious shortcoming for redhat-config-network Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Not applicable 2. 3. Additional info:
The problem is : If there's no standard way to connect via these USB modems, the support will be hard to add and maintain. The way should be : - Launch the appropriate command to load the firmware - Connect via pppoa or pppoe (if there's a bridge tool) With this structure, I've some ideas about how network-druid could be modified. An option would be added : xDSL via USB Modems connection would be added. Clicking on 'Next' would lead to a text which would inform the user than he must install the appropriate tools for his modem and where to find these tools (For example, using {redhat,system}-config-packages, then looking into the 'modem' category) The next step will lead to a configuration window. Following a description of the window : - A dropdown menu will present some USB modems (Sagem F@st 800/900/908/ -- Alcatel Speedtouch USB -- Bewan USB ...). These options would define the way to load the firmware. - Another dropdown menu below will show different country and ISP, those defining the VPI/VCI to use. The last option would be 'User defined VPI/VCI' which will let the user enter his own VPI/VCI numbers in two small text areas. - Then, the user will enter his/her login/password, given by his/her ISP, in two large text areas. After this, the configuration will be finished and the network tool will be able to launch the connection, loading the firmware before, if necessary. There's still a problem : How tools are added to the system ? Must the user install the tools himself ? How {redhat,system}-config-network-druid will know anything about what tools are installed ? A solution would be, taking the Speedtouch USB tools for example : The speedtouch RPM will install the necessary tools and write to a file, it's name in the dropdown menu, how and what firmware is loaded, then the network-druid could read this file to get the necessary informations. Another problem bring its nose : Some firmware are proprietary. If we stick to free software, the firmware can't be added neither to the official Fedora tree neither in the official ISOs. It can lead to some problems, forcing the user to download the firmware elsewhere but the firmware is absolutely necessary to bring the connection up and download the firmware. So... I haven't any good solutions for this problem. The last problem will be : Find a nice way to bring up the connection with every USB modem. That will be a bit difficult.
I'm a USB SpeedTouch-clone user in China available to help test developments until at least April this year. PS: With Chinese support (not quite automatically) there in FC3, and China's massive DSL rollouts (both PPPoE and PPPoA), adding this feature to Fedora could mean a great payoff in terms of potential new users. PPS: On the firmware issue, I believe some modems have firmware extract utilities(?), so if it's just a case of take & reload, perhaps these may be workable as a licensing kludge. Otherwise prompting the user for a firmware file (but letting them supply a URL instead, in the same box) is another suggestion, which would ease the user-experience (search google, copy, paste) while avoiding licensing.
https://hosted.fedoraproject.org/projects/system-config-network/ticket/21