Qualcomm, Inc. Sony Gobi 2000 Wireless Modem – OpenSuSE 12.1 – Vaio VPCSB

sony-vaio-vpcsb16fg-2

Hello,

Recently I’ve updated my openSuSE 11.4 to the latest openSuSE 12.1, it was a hassle free upgrade and my system is running smoothly, nevertheless I didn’t use one of my favorite features on this laptop, the built-in GSM card.
Today I needed it and, bummer,  it didn’t work, even if I could see it in network manager, I remembered I didn’t install the firmware (this card needs a firmware to be inserted every time the device boots). So I put the files in /lib/firmware/gobi and run gobi_loader it ran just perfect.
Next i reboot the laptop, but it didn’t load the firmware automatically, I’ve checked udev and the entry was missing.

So in order to use the Qualcomm, Inc. Sony Gobi 2000 Wireless Modem with the Vaio VPCSB you’ll need:

Install gobi_loader

sudo zypper in gobi_loader

Copy the firmware files to /lib/firmware/gobi (you can find these files on the net (i won’t put them here because of license issues) the names;

amss.mbn apps.mbn UQCN.mbn

With the latest gobi_loader from SuSE it’s all. But it still doesn’t work do the following:

Create a new udev rule file (with joe, vi, kwrite, gedit, etc), just don’t forget you must be root or use sudo:

vi /etc/udev/rules.d/61-gobi.rules

Content:

# udev rules for firmware loading on qualcomm gobi devices

ACTION==”add”, SUBSYSTEM==”tty” KERNEL==”ttyUSB*” GOTO=”gobi_rules”

GOTO=”gobi_rules_end”

LABEL=”gobi_rules”
ATTRS{idVendor}==”05c6″, ATTRS{idProduct}==”9225″, RUN+=”gobi_loader -2000 $env{DEVNAME} /lib/firmware/gobi”
LABEL=”gobi_rules_end”

Cheers,
Pedro Oliveira

Linux support?

From sometime now I’ve been working on debugging  software, I don’ mind using betas (with all the inherent pain), as a matter of fact I like it a lot. But recently I had a problem with my MERLIN U740 PCMCIA card (it’s a 3G modem). This card emulates two USB ports and in one there’s the modem. This as been working for year without problems but since the kernel 2.6.24 it stopped working in x86_64. I didn’t care that much as i was working out of the country and didn’t use the card. But now I need to use it so I posted a bug report in OpenSuSE (the distro i use) and I’ve been testing their output on this bug. Finally its solved in the kernel 2.6.31 (from the release candidate 3) and it will be included in the main stream OpenSuSE distribution 11.2 (it’s already included in the factory version).

The bug I’m talking about is described in:

https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=502557

and it’s about the following kernel messages:

USB HC takeover failed!  (BIOS/SMM bug)

So in the end i can say I’m pretty happy with Linux support, and this kind of support is available to open source distros, not only to enterprise level distributions such as SLES or RHE. Just keep on filling those bugs reports when you find one.
Cheers,
Pedro Oliveira

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