HOWTO: Cricket A600 Modem & Ubuntu

So the Cricket cooperation is too lazy to make their device function by default on Linux so the following is a method I came up with some months back for getting your Cricket A600 Modem working under Linux. There are two methods listed below, choose which ever suits your needs.

Easy Method for Installing (pre-compiled debs):

Attached are the debs and a flipflop.sh to get this working do the following -

Step 1:
Download the .deb file for your selected architecture (32bit or 64bit) && install it

Step 2:
Download the flipflop.sh, Now right click on the file and select "properties". Click over to the "permissions" tab, and check the box "allow executing file as a program". Now double click it and select "Run", enter your password. Wait a few moments and poof! Your 3g modem should now be appearing in your network manager.

Notes:

You will need to run the flipflop.sh every time you connect your modem.

Before this guide will work for you, you do need to load the device on a Windows/Mac system and install the software for the device and activate it. (I have a Windows VM for just such occasions, it worked fine)

Installing from Source:

Step 1:

Download the archive and extract the contents to your preferred directory.

Step 2:

Open up terminal and use cd to change into the directory of the extracted files.

32 bit Users - Install usb_modeswitch with the following command: sudo make install

64 bit Users - We need to recompile modeswitch to work on the 64bit platform. Run the following commands in terminal to do so run the following in order in terminal:
sudo apt-get install build-essential libusb-dev
rm usb_modeswitch
make
sudo make install

Step 3:

Plug in your Cricket A600 to an open USB port, wait a moment for it to be detected as a CD drive/the auto play menu to pop up. Now we just need to execute the flipflop.sh, it is in the directory of files you extracted, by running the following: sudo ./flipflop.sh (Please note you need to first make this file executable by running chmod +x flipflop.sh)

After running the flipflop.sh you need to wait about 12 seconds (while it works it's magic) and then poof! Your Cricket device should now appear in your network manager as a connection option.

Notes:

You will need to sudo ./flipflop.sh each time you attach the device for it to work.

Before this guide will work for you, you do need to load the device on a Windows/Mac system and install the software for the device and activate it. (I have a Windows VM for just such occasions, it worked fine)

I played around with udev some trying to automate this process when you play the device in, but I could not get it to work properly, if someone smarter/experienced than myself would like to figure that out I'd be more than happy to add it to this guide.

Trouble Shooting -
If this guide does not work for you try first opening up the flipflop.sh and increasing the sleep time from 10 seconds to 20 - some systems require a longer delay.

If anyone has any trouble or has any input let me know,
~Jeff Hoogland