After purchasing a Sprint broadband card I wanted to see if there was a way to make it work with Ubuntu Linux. After lots of searching I found a
document on Sprints web site that details the steps required to get their broadband cards working. The card I purchased was the Pantech PX-500. I am using Ubuntu 7.04, so the instructions were a little different. I had no need to configure the modem for graphical access, I just wanted a simple script I could run to share broadband using my old Linux laptop.
Here are the steps I followed to get the card working:
- Follow the steps on pages 21-22 of the Sprint guide.
- Setup masquerading on your Linux box. I used the command "sudo iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -s 192.168.1.0/24 -o ppp0 -j MASQUERADE". This will be different depending on your network configuration.
- And the final step that was somewhat hard to figure out was to setup IP forwarding. This was the magic trick to completing the whole setup "sudo sysctl -w net.ipv4.ip_forward=1". There appears to be several ways to make this work, but using sysctl was the only way I could make it work with my specific configuration.
- Bring up your connection with "sudo wvdial" and enjoy!