Small problem for Linux ? Sure. Big problem for Linux user? Of course.

I just bought a Sierra 598 USB "Internet on a Rope" dongle from Sprint.

Sprint's shelf-talker card in the store -- offset color printed -- says it's
compatible with XP, Vista, Mac *and Linux* (without specifying a kernel version or distro).

Alas, though unsurprisingly, Sprint's support doesn't know from Linux, and Sierra "doesn't support" Linux -- though they do have a linux@ address which is ticket-tracked (with custhelp.com's absolutely *miserable* system, but don't get me started on that) -- the best thing Sierra has for me is "it works on Fedora and Ubuntu".

The sticking point is apparently that the USB devices that expose the modem as ttyUSB *are mode switched* from the USB devices that expose the onboard "TRU-install" PRAM and MicroSD card slot; the driver is supposed to switch from one mode to the other... and hald or udev may be what's getting in its way, which brings me back on topic: how portable your software {is,can be} depends on *how low level stuff it has to do*.

SysVinit is fairly well disseminated across distros now, so large packages can make reasonable assumptions about how they'll have to set their daemons up to run and suchlike, but while we used to consider that "low-level" stuff, there are lots of new middleware layers in the average Linux distro these days, and it's (again) not so easy...

(If anyone has any pointers on the USB thing; the gory story is at: http://www.evdoforums.com/thread12302.html)