Aldi, a big german discounter offers an UMTS stick for 59,90 Euro. After buying a “starter set” for about 12 Euro and a prepaid card for 15 Euro, you are equipped to get a mobile network flat for 14,99 Euro per month. The following post describes, how to use the connection with Kubuntu Karmic Koala. The sim card has to be activated on http://medionmobile.de, this might take some time.
After that you have to activate the 30 days internet option first. Put the sim card in your mobile device and call 1155. Follow the instructions and note that the option will be renewed and cost another 14,99 Euro, if you have enough credit and if you not cancel it explicitly.
Unfortunately the KDE network manager is in an early state of development. It is very promising and integrates perfectly into KDE, but I couldn’t get it working with a mobile broadband connection. That’s why I use the network-manager-gnome until I can figure out what the problem is or a newer release fixes my problems.
Edit: See the comments for solving this issue and using knetworkmanager instead the Gnome software.
Install network-manager-gnome and remove the network manager KDE:
sudo apt-get –purge remove plasma-widget-networkmanagement && sudo apt-get install network-manager-gnome
Quit the KDE network manager and restart the network-manager backend:
kquitapp knetworkmanager && sudo /etc/init.d/network-manager restart
Start the network-manager-gnome with:
nm-applet
Connect the stick to your USB port, of course you have to put in the sim card again. The network manager will tell you that a new network device is available after some seconds. Add a new mobile broadband connection, the correct options should be given to you, if you choose AldiTalk/MedionMobile.
Be careful choosing the wrong APN can be very expensive.
4 Comments
Unfortunately using Aldi Talk is confusing. If you take tagesflat.eplus.de as an APN, you get a 24h flatrate, which costs 2€. If you take internet.eplus.de you pay 0.24€ for every megabyte of traffic.
You activate the 30days flatrate with special USSD codes with wammu.
I already opened a bug report in launchpad, hopefully the right place, because in network manager is the 0.24€/MB option the default, which is imho the worst standard setting.
https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/network-manager/+bug/502357
If you activated the 30 days flat via your mobile phone before connecting, it does not cost 0,24 Euro/MB. So the APN internet.eplus.de is correct, if you choose to use the 30 days flatrate. I checked it twice, my credit stays at the same level after activating the flatrate option.
I have successfully managed to connect to O2 wireless broadband using KNetworkManager. All it took was to edit .kde/share/apps/networkmanagement/connections/{file} and change the two lines from:
mru=0
mtu=0
to:
mru=1440
mtu=1440
and it should work.
There is a bug filed with KDE somewhere.
Thank you very much for this comment. It helped. I had to restart network-manager with
but after that I got a connection with knetworkmanager
. I will mention it in the post.