How To Configure Dongle D-Link On Ubuntu
Table of Contents
D-Link is a USB wireless card or commonly called dongle, used to connect a computer to the Internet through cellular networks. This tutorial will focus on one model DWP-157 and may be applied to other models of D-Link.
DWP-157 supports 3G networking and has this label “Linux Ubuntu 10.04 or above” on the System Requirements.
Now plug the wireless card
Plug in the USB dongle on your computer and soon a file manager will be launched with its contents. Copy the tarball “DTLW2_D305A_linux_4.0.2IN_160309.tar.gz” to your home directory, launch your terminal by right clicking and selecting Open Terminal Here on the copied location.
To extract the contents of the tarball execute this command –
tar -xvf DTLW2_D305A_linux_4.0.2IN_160309.tar.gz
How to install dongle?
Unplug the USB dongle and fire up your terminal by right clicking on where install and uninstall scripts are located.
and execute the command below –
sudo ./install.sh
then enter “yes” for the next prompt to start installing.
Connecting to the Internet
Make sure you have recharged the data pack 3G of your cellular network. Insert your SIM card in the dongle and
plug the dongle on one of the USB port. Click the Network Manager applet and enable the Mobile broadband option. Without any hiatus, you’ll get registered on the 3G network and will be labeled as “HSUPA”. Click Add new connection and set up your cellular network. Once done you’ll be connected automatically.In the future, all you’ve to do is plug in the dongle and enable the mobile broadband then select the cellular connection.
Work around with EDGE
You’ll probably face this issue some later time. And if you’re sure you registered a 3G data plan but your cellular network fails to EDGE only then… now comes the moment for you to execute some 3G script files installed manually. Fire up your terminal and execute –
sudo 3g_connect_proc.sh ttyUSB0
And on success, you’ll get the output such as shown below and don’t forget to check the network manager applet for confirmation
AGAIN, at rare times the network might be still clinging on to EDGE (that happened to me). What you’d have to do is suspend your computer and wake it up after some few seconds. Magic does it and you get back registered on the 3G network.
Install Modem Manager GUI
Install Modem Manager GUI to send and receive messages. Unfortunately, USSD seems to be a problem in some Countries but you could still monitor the chunks of bytes consumed alternatively (which will come later).To install the software key in this command on your terminal –
sudo apt install modem-manager-gui
Network monitoring
You probably wouldn’t want to exceed your data cap limit so in order to monitor your data consumed launch Modem Manager GUI and keep gaze on the lower bottom-left.
An itsy-bitsy mental math you need here 🙂 because the moment you disconnect your cellular data connection that bytes of data won’t remain and the label will change to “disconnected”. So next time you re-open your connection don’t forget to add the old value and the new value to estimate your current data usage.
Conclusion
Well that’s it and I hope this tutorial has been helpful. Though I’d rather apologize as there was no GUI way to remedy this type of situation but on the other side of this, it really is fun knowing that you are actually carrying out the task with the interface already provided (pretty much like a hacker).
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