Motorola GPRS on Ubuntu

If you use a Motorola phone to access the internet through GPRS, you are not alone. I use it extensively, including the Motorola V220, the Motorola L6, and the Motorola C390. All of them have mini usb plugs and for Windows the drivers are easily found online. I always assumed it would be very difficult to get my Motorola phone working with Ubuntu or other flavors of Linux, and even tried to find difficult explanations online. I could never get it to work until I dissected several different online informational posts. I pieced together a way to make it work and you know what? It is even easier than setting up a Motorola gprs modem on Windows. Here is how I did it.

1. Plug in the motorola phone. It should be recognized as ttyACM0.

2. Open a terminal window and type:
sudo wvdialconf /etc/wvdial.conf

You get a long list of checks that it runs. Basically it checks for a modem and the location.

3. next type:
sudo vi /etc/wvdial.conf

In the file, you need to edit a few entries, like edit out the semicolons at the start of the line for phone number, password and username. For user name and password, you can enter anything for those values. For phone number, I used *99#.

Next, add a line:
Stupid Mode = 1

You might want to change the baud rate, I used 230400 even though it detected that it could do 460800. GPRS is slow so I can’t personally think of a good reason to send data to and from the modem 10 times faster than it can deal with it.

4. Save the file.

5. Next open another terminal window and type
sudo wvdial

You are now connected to the internet and you can surf. I don’t know if you can close the window and keep the connection or not. I am just happy to be connected. I can deal with any quirks.

I hope this can serve as a little bit of help to any searching the forums for how to use a gprs modem with Ubuntu/Kubuntu. It seems really simple, but I have been searching on and off for 6 months for a way to connect through Ubuntu like this.