Testing a new modem with BeagleBoard - DIGI Net Mobil

I broke my old Prolink Modem by walking around while it was plugged in and twisting the USB plug. I got a newer 7.2MB capable modem from Deal Extreme. Plugged into the beagleboard it shows up as a CD as expected and I ejected it to get the ttyUSBx devices. Unfortunately on the first try none of them wanted to respond to AT commands, it only started working after I installed the driver on windows and connected it up. A throughput test shows that it is working slightly better than the 3.6Mb/s Prolink promises.

Usual diagonistics on Linux shows:
lsusb - 05c6:0015 Qualcomm, Inc.

ATQ command works and dialing proceeds then I get stuck in an Unsolicited Message Block ("+ZUSIMR:2") using the ModemManager/NetworkManager Combo.

ATI gives: 
Manufacturer: BMC INCORPORATED
Model: HD360
Revision: W1MV1.0.0B20100128 W1MV1.0.0B20100128 1  [Sep 4 2008 12:00:00]
IMEI:
+GCAP: +CGSM,+DS,+ES


Not much but at least a start for digging.

Living in the LiveCD - Frugal Linux

The openembedded huge bitbakes were running uncomfortably slow in the virtual machine. So I decided to install linux on USB and take it from there. The Karmic installer unfortunately put grub on my Vista boot disk while I wasn't looking , what a naughty koala.

So I do have BootRec to fix the boot sector on my Windows recovery CD, just for the kicks and performance feel I decided to live in the liveCD instead. I have a couple of build VMs on the windows drive, I installed virualbox and started up some VM's for persistent work. The virtualbox booted at least 4 times faster than in windows, they must have done some nice optimizations in the linux build.

The verdex new kernel build is going very very slowly. Since bitbake is based on Gentoo portage and I have done Gentoo stage 1 installs, from experience this will take a whole day or so. I hope I don't have to repeat the same experience with the BeagleBoard, since there is a prebuilt ubuntu distro from the arm port. At least the beagle-board is much cheaper than the Gumstix and the shipping is tolerably inexpensive. Now the very competitive HawkBoard is also in the market.