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Comment by errantspark | Hacker News Reader

My laptop has a built in cellular modem, I find that being connected to the internet constantly is much more useful in a laptop form factor. Phones mostly just try to serve me ads in invasive ways and I'm not here for it.

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AFAIK cell modems generally have functionality to send/receive SMSs, and you should be able to do that with the right software.

Completely agree about the walls of commercial surveillance closing in though.

Yeah, I'm sure it's possible to do so, but unfortunately my BIOS locks me into the OEM modem, there is no linux driver for it and the windows one is not documented so no luck for me in that regard. At some point I'll pour some more sweat into it and try to unlock the bios or something but sadly for now this functionality that my computer absolutely has is unavailable to me.

Same with getting NMEA sentences off the GPS, I have to use windows' idiotic location API for that. 9600 baud serial worked just fucking fine, I don't understand why that isn't available as well. It's so annoying that I have to fight this hard for functionality my hardware already has.

It doesn't have some AT capable "serial" port avaiable? A bit surprising.

Whatever comes with should work mostly fine, whitelist unlocks are for those didn’t option a WWAN. All WWAN modems are same, usually they have 3-5 serial ports for modem control, data, debug, and NMEA. My hunch is your ttyS2 takes “GPS enable” command and it’ll start murmuring it on ttyS4.

Refs:

https://whirlpool.net.au/wiki/sierra_advanced_gps

https://forum.openwrt.org/t/problem-accessing-gps-data-from-...

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mobile-broadband/ModemManager...

None of the TTYs that Windows exposes will even let me connect (access denied error even as admin) and there is no Linux driver, or maybe there is now with very recent kernels?[0]. It would surprise me if it worked well but I will spend some hours to find out soon. Intel/Fibocomm don't provide support for their modems except to OEMs afaik and I don't see any mention of successful connection under linux w/ my modem. (Fibocom L860-GL/Intel XMM 7560) around the internet. I have tried with some other LTE modem (model forgotten) in the past and I wasn't able to see it under Windows or Linux at all.

[0] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Intel-M....

Use USB-Mode.

[0] says it also supports MBIM which is supported ootb with ModemManager and somewhat recent kernels. If your BIOS does not allow this, you probably need to tape over the PCIe-Pins with some non-conductive tape.

[0] https://fccid.io/ZMOL860GL/User-Manual/Users-Manual-3993200....

What device?

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