Activation Of Internal UMTS/3G Datacards

What to do if you got a brand-new ThinkPad X300, but the internal 3G data card (a SierraWireless device with the USB ID 1199:6813) simply refuses to find a network, and as a result cannot connect?
Well, maybe the card is just deactivated by default to save battery. You can enable it easily by sending:

at+cfun?
+CFUN: 0

OK
at+cfun=1
OK


to it (AT+CFUN? returns the current state, AT+CFUN=1 enables the device) with a terminal program of your choice (i always use "screen /dev/ttyUSB0" for such tasks). At least the card remembers this setting, so you don't have to repeat it every time. However, a setting somewhere in UMTSmon to automatically deactivate the card when the program exits would be cool to save some more battery power... I will have to look into that.

Cross-Distro Packaging With Build Service Rocks!

During last hackweek a few days ago, i finished one of my pet projects: to fix up and package tuxcursors. That's fine for SUSE users out there, since i guess the package will be included in the next release, however it does not help the users of other distributions directly.
So i made my first try on building packages for Fedora and Mandriva (apart from my umtsmon packages, but those worked more by accident...) and i have to say that it is pretty easy and straightforward.
So if you want cute penguins waving at you as mouse cursors, go ahead and install the tuxcursors package for your distribution from my Build Service Home, easily found via http://software.opensuse.org/search/ (search for "tuxcursors", of course).
And if you think about packaging your project for more than one distribution, the openSUSE Build Service is definitely worth a look.

A warm welcome to the planetsuse.org readers

I finally got my act together and got syndicated on Planet SUSE which will probably multiply the number of readers of my ramblings by quite a big amount.
For those who don't know me already: i'm one of the guys of the fabulous Team Mobile Devices, located in the Nürnberg facility.
If i don't do things related to bluetooth, power management, UMTS/3G, suspend or other portable-computing stuff, i quite often hack on some small digital TV set-top-boxes, of course running Linux.
There will be the odd post in german on my blog, usually for stuff of local interest only. I hope you all can stand that.

So let's have a lot of fun...

P.S. if you want to reply on my blog, make sure not to have the string "http:" in your comment, or i will not even see it for moderation. Thanks, spammers!