ZTE AX226 Modem from Banglalion can be used on Ubuntu and other LInux

Banglalion, one of the two Wimax service provider in Bangladesh has a very portable, small sized modem made by ZTE corporation of China. Model is ZTE AX226. But the problem is Banglalion doesn't provide the driver software necessary to be used in Linux.

After a long time, the driver  is now successfully compiled for Linux. The original thread about the compilation process can be found here on the projanmo forum. The detailed instruction about how to use the modem can be found  here on the blog of one of the contributor . The author of that thread also included a recent  success story of using this modem on debian, so it should be easy using it on other Linux distribution.

The bad news is currently this driver can only be used on 32bit versions of Linux, since the original API for the driver from sprint missing support for 64bit Machines. Hopefully, it will be resolved soon.

Note that, the recent versions of Linux kernel from Ubuntu automatically (kernel versions 3+) includes the driver. Though you need the main programs (namely wimaxc, and wimaxd ) still now. To  insert the driver you need to execute this command in Ubuntu

    sudo modprobe bcm_wimax

How to automatically disable the global menu in gnome-shell session

The desktop of gnome-3 is not usable by default, this means right clicking on the desktop do not bring you a menu and you can't see any desktop icon. Although Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric) uses the gnome-3 libraries, it modify the settings so that you can right click on the desktop in Unity session. But if you install the gnome-shell in your unity desktop, the settings persists and you can right click also on gnome-shell session.

But the problem is unity uses a global-menu, which does also appear on the bottom of your gnome-shell top-panel. The default gnome-shell theme is dark enough, so it is not a very big problem. But if you change the gnome-shell theme to a lighter, you see the global-menu under the top-panel, which is not very nice. It becomes very bad when you have cinnamon installed or a custom-session with cairo-dock and/or Avant(AWN).

You can solve this problem by disabling the option of 'Have file manager handle the desktop' in gnome-tweak-tool or ubuntu-tweak. But you also lose the option of using the desktop. So, this is not a decent solution.

The solution:

1. go to /etc/X11/Xsession.d and open 80_appmenu and 80appmenu-gtk3 with your favorite editor with administrative power.
2. Comment out all the lines by placing a '#' mark, in front of the them in both the files.
3. Save and close 80_appmenu file.
4. Now add these lines at the bottom of 80_appmenu-gtk3 file:

if [ "x$DESKTOP_SESSION" = "xubuntu" ];

then

export UBUNTU_MENUPROXY="libappmenu.so"

fi

5. Now save and close 80_appmenu-gtk3 file.
6. Logout and Login again with gnome session or cinnamon or cairo-dock session.

Now you see that the global-menu is disappeared and you can also use the destkop.