Blizzardboy | A Kiwi in Japan

I picked up an Averatec netbook the other day – in Japan at the moment there are some great deals for netbooks if one signs up at the same time for a mobile broadband plan. If you get the broadband plan there are cancellation penalty fees, but these work out to be less than the savings on the netbook, making the process worthwhile from a financial perspective even if it is rather time consuming (much the same as getting a regular mobile phone in Japan).

I was planning just to return the mobile broadband device to Docomo yesterday, but we have a phone system install to do in a rural part of Japan over the weekend, and I found out that there wont be internet access on site while we are doing the install. As we are working with offshore vendors on this, not having the internet would be a hindrance, so I decided to keep the foma connection for a few days.

Thing is, I am not a big fan of Windows, so I wanted to be able to use the A2505 with linux. There isn’t much information around for setting this up (of course NTT don’t support Linux, and aren’t likely to until somewhere around 2030 – they are a little backward). There is a bit of information for setting up emobile clients on linux (here is a good article: http://nlweb.iii.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~iwase/tips/fc6emobile.html ).

After a fair bit of playing around (not least since the screen on the averatec 1000 is so small, but that is another story), we got it working on the netbook which is running Fedora 10.

To start off, from the command line, check dmesg to see if it recognizes the A2505 as a device.
Then from the command line type:

sudo modprobe vendor=0x16d5 product=0x6202

This will set tell linux what the device is.

If you want to, and you probably will, automate this (ie. so you don’t have to do it every time you reboot), create a file

sudo vi /etc/udev/rules.d/50-anydata-a2502.rules

and add the following:

SUBSYSTEM=="usb", SYSFS{idProduct}=="6202", SYSFS{idVendor}=="16d5", RUN+="/sbin/modprobe usbserial vendor=0x16d5 product=0x6202"

The next step to get it up and running is to go to System -> Administration -> Network
This will ask for your root password, then after you enter that it brings up the Network Configuration GUI.
Click on New -> Modem Connection -> Select Provider.
Add *99**4# in the space for Phone Number, and mopera in the login name and password fields. Add a provider name, but that can be anything. Hit forward and it brings up the dhcp settings - you shouldn't have to change anything. Keep clicking until you finish with the wizard. Hit the Activate button. And your connection should be working.

The connection with the foma a2505 seems quite fast. But if you have a choice you should probably go with the emobile offering - it wins on price and ease of installation.

Thanks to Hiwada-san for his help, and to the author of http://mizupc8.bio.mie-u.ac.jp/pukiwiki/?FOMA%2FA2502.