I just bought Huawei E169 to replace my Huawei E220. It doesn’t work out of the box but I able to get it to work on ubuntu 8.10 with a little tweak. Photo above shows how it looks like with my Thinkpad X61.

1. Download usb_modeswitch.
wget http://www.draisberghof.de/usb_modeswitch/usb-modeswitch_0.9.5_i386.deb

2. Install it.
sudo dpkg -i usb-modeswitch_0.9.5_i386.deb

3. Save this script in /usr/sbin/ as e169_switch
#!/bin/sh
/usr/sbin/usb_modeswitch -v 12d1 -p 1001 -d 1
/usr/sbin/usb_modeswitch -v 12d1 -p 1001 -H 1

4. Make it run
sudo chmod u+x /usr/sbin/e169_switch

5. And make another file in /etc/udev/rules.d as 70-e169.rules
SUBSYSTEM=="usb" SYSFS{idProduct}=="1001", SYSFS{idVendor}=="12d1", RUN+="/usr/sbin/e169_switch"

6. Reboot. And walla! It’s plug and play via Gnome NetworkManager 0.7.

Thanks to Liam Green-Hughes

The two USB ports on the right side of my laptop do not work. The one USB port on the left side does. I found a solution in ubuntuforums by adding irqfixup to the kernel arguments fixed it.


sudo sed -i.bak -e 's/\(^# kopt=.*$\)/\1 irqfixup/g' /boot/grub/menu.lst && sudo update-grub