Don Marti

Sat 12 Jun 2010 10:19:00 PM PDT

Verizon mobile broadband on a Thinkpad

Just got one more thing working on the Lenovo T400s: the Qualcomm "Gobi" mobile broadband card (which shows up as USB ID 05c6:9202). This works for me with Fedora 12.

1. Install gobi-loader.

2. Start a Microsoft Windows guest under VirtualBox and install the Qualcomm driver "package" from the Lenovo site. Search for and zip up all the amss.mbn and apps.mbn files and copy over to the Linux host. (Make a regular .zip file, not some .zipx jibber-jabber.)

3. There should be a bunch of .mbn files, for different carriers. Use strings and grep to find the Verizon ones. Put them in the /lib/firmware/gobi directory.

4. Power-cycle the machine. (Just removing and reinserting the qcserial driver did not work for me.)

5. On reboot, right-click the NetworkManager applet, select "Edit Connections," and go to the "Mobile Broadband" tab. Click "Add," and the "Set up a Mobile Broadband Connection" screen should include the Qualcomm device.

6. Set up the connection. Leave the number as #777, and set the username to 0000000000@vzw3g.com and the password to vzw (Replace the 0s with the 10-digit number Verizon assigned you.

7. Use NetworkManager normally to bring the connection up and down.