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Tuesday, July 26, 2011

GPRS with Nokia and Kubuntu

For the first time in years, my BSNL internet connection stopped working - for 4 days. So, I was forced to try out GPRS. Airtel has this nice plan which provides 50MB internet for Rs 5, valid for 1 day (midnight to midnight - dial *222*5#). Perfect for my situation!

I have Kubuntu on my home comp and have a Nokia 6300. I was wondering how difficult it would be to get my Nokia phone to work with it. But surprise surprise, configuration was a breeze, and I had internet working in about 4 clicks and 0 key strokes. KDE network manager rocks! \m/

Being used to a speed of 4mbps, well, GPRS felt SLOW. The connection was pretty stable. Gmail took 5 minutes to open (the basic HTML view). Google chat worked fine through pidgin and thunderbird managed to pull my office mail. All I could download in 5 hours was 11MB (so much for the 50MB per day offer).

In all, I learnt 3 things - Nokia modem works with Kubuntu, GPRS is a decent backup if the main internet connection breaks, and it is really really hard to use up 50MB!

3 comments:

Prashant said...

you finally switched to KDE huh?

Prashanth Kamle said...

Yup. I didn't like gnome3 and ubuntu unity.

Prashant said...

hope KDE guys do not do something insane on similar lines...