While preparing my MacBook Pro which I bought for myself on my 30th birtday this Wednesday one of the things to get done was to get the 3G-modem to work. Having used the modem on my various Windows-machines before I knew that a OS X installer was lying around on the internal memory, so I just fired it up. Sadly it turned out that the Launch2Net installer failed, so I proceeded to uninstall it.

After awhile I found a newer version of Launch2Net which allegedly is Snow Leopard compatible (I need to learn that 10.x releases actually differ quite a lot internally from time to time), so I downloaded that one and installed it. Only problem now was that even though the manual claimed that the software would fire up automatically when the modem was inserted nothing happened! No matter how many times I uninstalled the software, rebooted or removed it with AppCleaner and then re-installed it. No go.

By now I started wondering if the rollback of the first installer hadn’t ended cleanly. Long story short, after learning that drivers aren’t what drivers are in Windows but are rather installed as kernel extensions I began looking for where these extensions are stored, the answer is: /System/Library/Extensions. Well, lo and behold – even after having uninstalled all visible traces of the software there were extensions left (named NMSonyEricsson[...]). After having manually deleted these extensions (which actually are folders containing binaries and other stuff) I rebooted and then installed the latest version of Launch2Net SonyEricsson Edition (the link is specifically for the modem I have (SonyEricsson MD400) which in my case happens to be 1.9.1.0 and then rebooted again.

Now it all works! The software fires up when I plug in the modem and it configures itself according to the network the SIM card belongs to and I’m able to connect. I’ve been listening to Spotify for the past 40 minutes now without a hitch – so I’m happy!

What I’m taking away from this is that I continue to not be surprised by the crappy quality a lot of cell network providers have to live with when distributing hardware for which someone else provides the software. Especially when we’re talking about a niche operating system like Mac OS X.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 5th, 2009 at 01:54 and is filed under Debugging, Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.