As the issue of having to pay a lot to connect to the Internet during my jetlagged night sessions was bothering me, I bought a 3G device in a nearby Vodafone shop to do the job (at the mere cost of four hours of connection!). It is a Vodafone USB Stick K3773 and I was unsure it would work under Linux (Ubuntu 12.04). When mounting the USB stick, I first saw there was a Linux directory on the stick, with the instruction to run ./install as root. I tried that and it did not work. I then checked the stick was working under windows, which was the case. I could not find helpful advices on the forums (fori!). So I fiddled for a few minutes and came with the idea of installing from my directory rather than from the (read-only) disk. Changed the attributes of the install file to executable. And ran it again. It surprisingly worked! The device is now recognised as a network wired connection (eth1) whenever I start my (Compaq) laptop.
Here are my commands, in case it helps:
xian$ mkdir QuickStart xian$ cp /media/QuickStart\ 3.7/linux_mbb_install/* QuickStart/. xian$ cd QuickStart xian$ chmod +x install xian$ sudo ./install
It is rather slow (20 Kb/s) but this may a good way to manage my time on line!