"So, I went to a Three shop, 10km away. I approached
the shop assistant. "Does your dongle support GNU/Linux?" The
answer: "Ah mate, I don’t know, officially it's Windows and
Mac... I know of a guy who tried but it didn't work". It turns out
that the dongle I tried at the Telstra shop was the "old version"
offered by Three. Only the new ones were available. I took a deep
breath, and bought one. The shop attendant activated it for me.
"It was recognised, but it didn't work -- it didn't connect.
After a search online, and a lot of stress, I discovered that the
APN needed to be changed into "3services" rather than "3netaccess".
I did exactly that. It worked. I was online immediately after
activation. In fact, right now I am connected using that very
dongle. The causes
"My small odyssey could have been a whole lot worse. I could
have discovered that the new Three dongle wasn't actually
supported. The fix to the problem could have been harder and
required black magic, rather than a configuration change from the
GUI. The question really is: why did it happen? Why is a GNU/Linux
user still treated as a second class citizen in the end-user IT
industry?"
