Airtel (Huwai E3272) 4G LTE on CentOS-7

I'm happy that finally the official CentOS 7 is available for installation.

I had great experience and thoroughly enjoyed the seamless installation procedures.

Some precautions:

Try not to burn the ISO as a DVD and please refer to the CentOS page here, since

dd if=your.iso of=/path/to/your/USB will do the magic.

Also, please wait for the complete image copy - as the UEFI Dual BIO configurations are very sensitive and you might end up getting the

"Can't read kernel : /images/pxeboot/vmlinuz".

Also, disable secure boot before installation and you can enable after the installation is over.

Later you can enable only "UEFI boot option"  from "UEFI and Legacy" options.

Though the part, the RedHat provided preupg assistant wasted almost 2 hours of my Sunday time - when trying to upgrade from 6.5 and above.

Assuming you had great pleasure while installing CentOS 7 on your UEFI hardware, and also assuming you network is working fine, if you want to have your Airtel 4G LTE working on your 7 installation, you will need the following.

• Setup of a clean EPEL repository
• Setup Extras (not mandatory)
• finally yum -y update with no transactions pending

Now, the Actual installation part.

If you have a 32bit installation (I doubt you could get hold of it officially yet), you are well off then.

For a 64bit installation, first copy the contents from the LTE, and make the install_linux as executable.

chmod +x install_linux

Executes, then if you get the compiler not found error, (I got since I did not install the development packages), please install dev packages.

Now, if you get ld-linux.so.2, ELF and cannot stat error,

then, you have to yumm it up for /lib/ld-linux.so.2 libX11.so.6 libpam.so.0 libstdc++.so.5

Then try to execute /usr/local/airtel/UninstallMobilePartner.

Mostly, it would not happen, but a try might save some time.

Now, that the 32 bit libraries are available and previous erroneous installation is gone, try the executing the install_linux again.

This time you should see an xterm, with NIOS module not installed and check your gcc version error might occur.

It is ok, since modem is anyways active. And you are happy to browse.

Another fact is on Fedora 20 you could see the Airtel application like you see on Windows.

With CentOS7 or RHEL 7 (I tried the beta, not sure how is the actual release vesion), you will see something like this.

All the required settings are already published by the installer, however, you can still configure authentications like username and password by selecting the network settings.

Note: On a KVM setup, I could see the Airtel Application window like the one on Windows, and on real metal it didn't show up.

So, finally a wireless data provider with good speed on Linux in India.

~Peace.