Portable Connectivity

In my current situation I move around a great deal - I'm on public transport, which means waiting at stations and cafes, and each weekend is usually spent somewhere else, be it at the house, visiting friends, or off to see relatives. I'm also hoping - once the house has sold - to get a motorbike and start touring holidays, and I want to have the flexibility to check my mail, Facebook, do some map browsing, a bit of MSN Messenger, and (perhaps) the odd Skype call. Yes, I'm that geeky (grin).

Realistically, this makes buying a fixed internet connecton kind of pointless - I'm on a 6 month rental contract with a house share for those days when I'm in the Maidenhead area, and pretty much all the internet providers offer a minimum of a 12 month deal, with the optimum savings linked to an 18 month deal.

I also needed a very lightweight, small laptop that I can chuck in a bag - something that's not too bulky, and not too expensive either as I don't believe that tech should be uber-expensive.

As already mentioned, I have a 16MB, 512K Asus EEE laptop - a tiny wee thing with a 7" screen, and it rocks. Here's a full list of kit I'm currently using:

• Asus EEE sub notebook with 8Gb solid state disk, 512K RAM, running Ubuntu 7.10


• Huawei E169G mobile broadband card


• Western Digital 500Gb USB external hard disk


• External DVD-RW drive

Most of this kit works straight out of the box, and is great because it lets me take the bare minumum if I need to, or the works if I want to. The only thing to watch out for is the mobile broadband card - these come with solid state storage so that all the drivers and documentation are on the device itself. What I've found is that everything works OK if you plug this in before you switch the Asus on, but if you plug it when the notebook's running it will get recognised as a storage drive rather than a modem. You can check this by making sure that there are three new USB tty devices created:

/dev/ttyUSB0
/dev/ttyUSB1
/dev/ttyUSB2

Once these are successfully created you can use the Betavine Vodafone driver to set up and manage your connections. This software works regardless of your provider - I've successfully used to to connecto Three (3) and Orange networks.

I think this is a general issue with Huawei devices - I use an E220 with a HP 8510w laptop running Windows for work and I still find things to be a little finnicky with the drivers.