Airtel GPRS with E-tel P7 in Fedora 11

Here's how I configured an E-tel P7 phone in Fedora 11 to connect to the internet via GPRS. I was successful with a Sony Ericsson W200i. All I have to do was to create a new mobile broadband connection. But when P7 was connected it was detected as a modem but I couldn't connect to the internet. So I tried with wvdial.

STEP 1:

First check whether wvdial is installed
$whereis wvdial

If it returns something like
wvdial: /usr/bin/wvdial /usr/share/man/man1/wvdial.1.gz

then you have wvdial installed. If not install wvdial
$yum install wvdial (need to be super user)

STEP 2:

Configure wvdial
$wvdialconf

After the configuration /etc/wvdial.conf will be created. Then open this file a text editor and replace the whole text with

[Dialer Defaults]
Init1 = AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","airtellive","",0,0
Init2 = ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0
Stupid Mode = yes
Modem Type = USB Modem
Baud = 460800
New PPPD = yes
Modem = /dev/ttyACM0
ISDN = 0
Phone = *99#
Password = a
Username = a

[Modem0]
Init3 = ATM0
SetVolume = 0
Modem = /dev/ttyACM0
Dial Command = ATDT
Baud = 460800
FlowControl = NOFLOW
Init1 = ATZ

Try replacing the text in Init 1 as follows for the following service providers

Dialog Postpaid: AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","www.dialogsl.com",,0,0
Dialog Prepaid: AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","ppinternet",,0,0
Mobitel: AT+ CGDCONT=1,”IP”,”mobitel3g”

STEP 3:

Open /etc/resolve.conf from a text editor and append the following line

nameserver 4.2.2.2

STEP 4:

As super user issue
$wvdial

Your done !

Fireup firefox and start surfing, don't forget to clear the tick on "work offline" in ff ;-)

STEP 5:

yeah termination. Press Ctrl+c in the terminal where you issued wvdial

Sources:
http://www.brantel.lk/
http://tuxomaniac.wordpress.com/2007/12/20/airtel-gprs-on-linux-with-nokia-phone/

Acer Aspire 4736z with Fedora 11

This all about my experience with Acer Aspire 4736z notebook with Fedora 11. F11 installation went smoothly and after the installation many worked well, except the following issues.

Touchpad tap

Touchpad tap don't work by default. The solution is simple. Just go to System -> Preferences -> Mouse, click on touchpad tab and tick Enable mouse clicks with touchpad


Ethernet port

Install Atheros ethernet drivers and it will work.

Headphone jack

The problem is that even when the headphone is connected, sound comes from the notebook speaker instead of from the headphone. The solution is here. And in my case adding options snd-hda-intel model=auto to /etc/modprobe.conf did the trick. If /etc/modprobe.conf does not exist just create a file /etc and save it as modprobe.conf.

Multimedia shortcut keys with Amarok

I use Amarok as my media player and the media shortcut keys don't work with Amarok. There's a Amarok script which solves the problem. Just download it from here and follow the instructions there.

I hope that this will help you and you are welcome to add more tweeks if there are any.

purple-microblog to Gwitter

Earlier I used purple-microblog, a pugin for pidgin as a twitter client for my desktop. But pidgin had some issues with SCIM so sometimes I couldn't use my native language. Despite that issue, purple-microblog is a cool plugin for pidgin. So I searched for some other twitter clients.

Founds some for linux. Among twitux, mitter were good. But gwibber was the best. GTwitter as most say the best had some issues. Gwibber supports some other protocols also. Only used a day. So far so good :-)

Twitter, Facebook and Pidgin

Pidgin is one of the most popular IM client in linux as well as in windows. It supports multi protocols and have a lot of plugins.

purple-microblog is a plugin for pidgin which enables you to update your twitter status, display others' status, display replies etc.

For Fedora install purple-microblog as follows
yum install purple-microblog

After installing don't forget to enable Twitgin plugin in pidgin. Go to Tools --> Plugins and enable Twitgin plugin.

Now comes Facebook. In my Facebook account I have installed twitter application which enables you to view twitter updates and update Facebook status as you update twitter.

Just another method to make things easier :-) .

Watch videos in linux terminal

Ever thought of watching a video in linux terminal ? Give it a try.

mplayer -vo caca <video file>

To have a black and white output

mplayer -vo aa <video file>

Enjoy.........

Online Java Compiler

http://www.innovation.ch/java/java_compile.html

This is an online java compiler. All you have to do is just upload the java source files and set compiler parameters as you wish, select the JDK version and press "compile". If there are no compilations errors the next page will provide you with a link to download the compiled java (*.class) files.

CDPATH

CDPATH is an environmental variable in linux which specifies the additional base for cd command. Suppose you frequently cd from /etc, in terminal issue export CDPATH=/etc. Now if you issue cd mail from any location, you will be in /etc/mail (unless there's no such directory named "mail" in your current location.)

To set several bases issue export CDPATH=.:[base 1]:[base 2] etc.

To make this bases permanent add export CDPATH=.:[base 1]:[base 2] to your ~/.bash_profile