A colleague of mine wanted to get some kind of mobile broadband solution for his netbook – an Acer Aspire One. Brilliant little machine. I fancy a Samsung NC10 myself, or maybe an Asus 1008HA Seashell.

Anyway, he’s running the standard Acer OS – Linpus. He already had the ‘Mobile Partner’ application installed, which is required if you want to connect using a Huawei modem. We plugged the dongle in, and it was recognised by the software within a few seconds, albeit as a Huawei E220 (technically identical to the E160). It picked up a perfectly reasonable O2 3G signal considering we were indoors. Next came the creation of a ‘profile’ for the connection. We set up a new one, called it ‘O2′, and attempted to enter the settings. This is where we got a bit stuck. O2 dont provide any help for this OS. There is software available for Windows and Mac OS X, but that configures your connection settings for you. We needed the settings for a manual setup. A quick Google or two later, and we had found a variety of suggested settings. We tried all of them, but to no avail. In the end, I remembered that when I set a manual connection up on my Mac laptop, I didnt need usernames or passwords, just the APN. So I went ahead and set the APN to be ‘m-bb.o2.co.uk’, with a phone number of ‘*99#’. I’d read that the username of ‘o2bb’ with a password of ‘password’ may be necessary, but I didnt enter these. I left the authentication method as CHAP. As with the other settings we tried, we just kept being presented with the ‘Connecting..’ message, but it never seemed to complete the connection. The light on the dongle (green for GSM, blue for 3G) went solid, which suggested to me that it was completing the connection, but maybe not authenticating?

A bit more Googling, and someone suggested that the Mobile Partner software recently had a bug introduced, which meant that the ‘Connecting…’ message would remain on the screen, even once it had made a successful connection! The workaround is to just minimise the Mobile Partner software once  the light changes to solid. Then you can just load up your web browser, etc, and it should all just work! It certainly did for us.