It was only today that I put into use my Huawei E303C modem into use. I had not used it for almost 6 months. And today I  plugged it in it with the IDEA 3G sim on Ubuntu 13.04. The Huawei linux drivers almost gave me a headache and finally to get the device working . Finally I had to uninstall it and I found out that Ubuntu 13.04 automatically detects my modem.

Now people out there who have already screwed up by trying to install the Linux drivers for Huawei modem, just uninstall and reinstall the usb-modeswitch and things should be perfect.

sudo apt-get remove usb-modeswitch usb-modeswitch-data
sudo apt-get install usb-modeswitch

Now after all these I still had one major problem in front of me. To know the balance that I have on my SIM I had to remove it from the modem insert it in to my mobile and check. It is then that I found this wonderful application in ubuntu called “prepaid manager”

sudo apt-get install prepaid-manager-applet

Once this is done you will have to change a few lines in an XML file.

go to /usr/share/mobile-provider-info

and with root permissions open the serviceproviders.xml file.

In this file go to the country and to the service provider you are using and add the following lines just before the closing gsm tag </gsm>

<balance-check>
<ussd>”USSD CODE TO GET BALANCE</ussd>
</balance-check>
<balance-top-up>
<ussd replacement=”CODE”>*USSD CODE TO RECHARGE*CODE#</ussd>
</balance-top-up>

Once this is copied make sure to change USSD CODE TO GET BALANCE to the required code for me since I was using IDEA it was *125#

Till now I have not tried the top up option, if any of my readers have done that too please eel free to comment.