Rogers Rocket Mobile Internet Stick on Gentoo Linux – Part 1

flashman — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 23:56:48 +0000

Part 1 – Hardware Recognition and Configuration

I picked up a new Rogers Rocket Mobile Internet Stick recently to use with my laptop so that I can stay connected while I am on the road. My Blackberry is great, but for some tasks, it just doesn’t cut it. For those who don’t know, the Rocket Mobile Internet Stick is a Novatel Ovation MC950D Mobile Broadband USB Modem which lets you connect to the Internet through the Rogers Wireless 3G network. It’s capable of download speeds up to 7.2 Mbps.

The Ovation MC950D modem is interesting in that for Windows it uses Zero-CD technology. When you first plug the modem into your PC’s USB port under Windows, it mounts on-board flash memory as a virtual CD-ROM drive and installs the driver and connection software.

Being a long time Gentoo Linux user, I was ready for the challenge of getting my new modem up and running under my favorite Linux distro.

Getting Started

Unfortunately, the SIM card that comes with the Ovation MC950D cannot be activated on the Rogers Wireless Network under Linux. I had a real aversion to using Windows in order to get my modem working on Linux, so I popped the SIM card into my Blackberry and booted it up so it could be found on the Network for the first time. Any cell phone should work for this purpose, or you could go the Windows route, insert the SIM card into the Mobile Internet Stick and plug it into a Windows PC for this first activation.

Kernel Configuration

Getting the activation out of the way, I plugged in the stick and watched my log files to find out what would happen. From my log files, it was obviously not going to just work out of the box. I was missing a few kernel options.

Here are some of the things you need to make sure you have configured in your kernel. I am running Gentoo-Sources 2.6.25-r8.

IP and PPP Support: (Some general support which is required for IP and PPP)

Networking --->
 Networking options --->
  <*> Unix domain sockets
  [*] TCP/IP networking

Device Drivers --->
 [*] Network device support --->
  <*> PPP (point-to-point protocol) support
  <*> PPP support for async serial ports
  <*> PPP support for sync tty ports
  <*> PPP Deflate compression
  <*> PPP BSD-Compress compression

Support for the Ovation MC950D Modem:

Device Drivers --->
 [*] USB support --->
  <*> USB Serial Converter support --->
   [*] USB Generic Serial Driver
   <*> USB driver for GSM and CDMA modems

Support for the virtual CD-ROM drive on the modem:

Device Drivers --->
 [*] USB support --->
  <*> USB Mass Storage support

File systems --->
 CD-ROM/DVD Filesystems --->
  <*> UDF file system support

Other tips:

Another kernel option I had configured that interfered with the detection of the Ovation MC950D modem was:

Device Drivers --->
 [*] Block Devices --->
  <*> Low Performance USB Block driver

This option conflicted with USB Mass Storage. If you have this option configured, enable the following to avoid the conflict:

Device Drivers --->
 [*] USB support --->
  [*] The shared table of common (or usual) storage devices

Once I recompiled my kernel and rebooted, my Ovation MC950D was recognized under Gentoo. The USB Mass Storage driver was loaded and since I run KDE, the virtual CD-ROM drive portion of the modem was mounted.

When the virtual CD-ROM drive is mounted, lsusb shows the Ovation MC950D connected with ID 1410:5010. If you unmount the drive (disconnect the Mass Storage driver via eject), the ID will change to 1410:4400 and udev will create the /dev/ttyUSB device(s).

Automating the Mode Switch

Since the virtual CD-ROM drive is not really of any use under Gentoo Linux, I started looking for a way to have the MC950D connected as a modem when it was plugged in. I came across a handy package for just such a thing called USB_ModeSwitch.

As chances would have it, version 0.9.4 of USB_ModeSwitch is in the Gentoo Portage tree. I did an emerge sys-apps/usb_modeswitch and had it installed in short order. The next task was getting it configured and working.

Unfortunately, there were a couple of errors with the ebuild at the time that I installed that I had to work through:

The “91-usb_modeswitch.rules” file gets installed in the /etc/udev directory. You will have to move it to /etc/udev/rules.d
The first line in the “91-usb_modeswitch.rules” file starts with “SUBSYSTEMS”. This needs to be changed to “SUBSYSTEM”. It will not work if the extra S is not removed.

For the Ovation MC950D modem, the contents of the “91-usb_modeswitch.rules” file should be modified to match this (all on one line):

SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="1410",
 ATTRS{idProduct}=="5010",
 RUN+="/usr/sbin/usb_modeswitch"

In order to get USB_ModeSwitch to automatically switch the mode on the Ovation MC950D modem, the appropriate section of /etc/usb_modeswitch.conf needs to be uncommented.

Look for the section that starts off with “Novatel Wireless Ovation MC950D HSUPA.” Uncomment the configuration options in that section by removing the semi-colons from in front of the options. Add semi-colons in front of the configuration options in any other sections to comment out options for other hardware.

After setting up the configuration for USB_ModeSwitch, the /dev/ttyUSB device(s) were created automatically when I plugged in my Novatel MC950D USB modem.

Next Steps