Who’s your daddy? NetworkManager is…

Yeah, I’m talking to you happy, carefree, wireless-using, Nordic-looking prettygirl, with your Sprint Novatel S720 all up in our face.

prettygirl

I spent an hour or so hacking in CDMA card support on top of Tambet Ingo’s awesome 3G mobile broadband and PPP bits. And it just works. And like the GSM cards that Tambet’s got working, your VPN works over it too. Like magic. Tambet is the man.

What we do need to do, though, is standardize a method in HAL for tagging CDMA and GSM cards as “modems” (along with other things that are modems and accept AT commands). We also need to tag cards as CDMA or GSM. David Zeuthen had a few ideas on this, but I think in the end it’s going to have to be with .fdi files, because vendors just don’t follow the spec. There are separate USB protocol numbers allocated for CDMA and GSM devices, but no card I’ve been able to find uses them. And that won’t work for PCMCIA-based devices like the Sierra Wireless AirCard 860. When will hardware manufacturers learn? (hint: likely never).

The CDMA support won’t go into trunk until Tambet’s added yet more hotness, like signal strength detection and pulling out the currently connected network and showing that to the user. I’ve proved, though, that it’s trivial to add the CDMA bits when the GSM support is further along.

Rejoice, and be merry, for the wireless future is almost here.