[elrepo] Trying to install Sierra "TRU-Install" patch for 3G air card

[Akemi Yagi]

On Mon, Dec 28, 2009 at 10:16 AM, Jeff Phillips <jeffp at jeffszone.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I'm trying to get a Sierra Wireless USB 598 CDMA 3G air card working
> under CentOS. The USB device has two modes. On a windows machine it
> will initially act as a USB flash drive and autorun the windows driver
> setup application stored on the device itself. After the drivers are
> installed then Windows will no longer recognize it as being a flash
> drive but instead will recognize it as being a modem. This
> "TRU-install" feature as they call it causes problems with Linux
> recognizing the modem as a worthless flash drive instead of a modem.
>
> The manufacturer provides these instructions:
>
> http://sierrawireless.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/500
>
> I didn't have any problem installing the driver as described, but I'm
> not sure what I'm doing with their TRU-Install kernel patch. It says
> this kernel patch is required versions prior to 2.6.23. I'm running
> 2.6.18 so I need the patch. Here it is:
>
> http://www.sierrawireless.com/resources/support/Software/Linux/patch-2-6-18-swoc-unusualdevs.zip
>
> It's only a 705 byte file, but I don't know where to put it or what to
> do with it. Their generic instructions are to download & extract the
> generic kernel from kernel.org and add then make it with this patch
> included. But the CentOS guys say I shouldn't do that, and one of them
> referred me to check here.
>
> I tried applying the ElRepo kmod-sierra module. That did something or
> other, but I'm not sure what. It still seems to recognize the device
> as being a USB flash storage volume rather than a modem, so I am
> guessing the kmod-sierra module installed the drivers but not the
> TRU-install patch. Is there any way we could perhaps get this
> TRU-install patch included with the kmod-sierra module, or another
> one?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Jeff Phillips

Hi Jeff,

We talked a bit on #centos-social.

The first thing to do is to get the vendor:device ID pairings of your
hardware.  Please take a look at:

http://elrepo.org/tiki/DeviceIDs

and identify the IDs and see if they are listed under sierra.ko.

Akemi / toracat