[plug] bigpond wireless (maxon) modem

[cobel at bigpond.com]

Hi there, I have the bigpond (maxon) blue desktop wireless modem (too far out for anything but satt or wifi) and I am trying to get it going with linux. At the moment I am using it successfully with Kubuntu feisty fawn, getting 540kbps

I used the instructions at : http://quozl.netrek.org/bp3-usb/

**note that the location of the kernel module varies as per distribution, and the "\" symbol in the commands means 'line break' - that might sound obvious to some, but not to everyone! trust me...

I used the usbserial module (since I dont know how to patch the airprime module), once that was done and set up with kppp the computer could ping google, and do apt-get functions, but konqueror can not browse, every attempt returns an error like - 'An error occurred while loading http://www.google.com: Could not connect to host http://www.google.com/.' 

I then had the idea to apt-get firefox, and that does browse the internet.

so - problem sort of solved, except that the interface ppp0 does not appear in Knetwork setup so I cannot configure it in any way to be the 'default' route, I think this is why konq cannot use the internet connection? It does show up in ifconfig, however.

anyway, at present I am running kubuntu from the CD as I am also having dramas installing it and so far other distros i have tried have not been able to use the modem at all (Puppy Linux, Centos, Mandriva, Suse)

well, anyone with any recent experience with this modem? any input would be helpful, any other distros that are working fine with this modem?

and thank-you to that very helpful soul at tech support who actually talked to me instead of giving me the standard "we dont support linux, we cant help you (now just go away please)" response - you were only the fourth transfer, not too bad for a phone call to telstra/bigpond 

;)