Comment 5 for bug 350904

Here is a workaround that may work for some...

It is possible to pass the usb serial vendor and product id as a kernel parameter.

The easiest way to do this is to edit /boot/grub/menu.lst (you will need root access so from a terminal window type "sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst").

At the end of the line that starts with "kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.28-11-generic root=UUID=" or something similar, append the following two parameters: " usbserial.vendor=0x19d2 usbserial.product=0x0064". Obviously you will replace 0x19d2 and 0x0064 with the ids for your particular modem.

When you are done, menu.lst should look something like this:

title Ubuntu jaunty (development branch), kernel 2.6.28-11-generic custom
uuid 44daa138-39e6-450f-b840-76940da90d1f
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.28-11-generic root=UUID=f2441938-7359-49d7-95eb-81f36a166757 ro quiet splash usbserial.vendor=0x1c9e usbserial.product=0x6061
initrd /initrd.img-2.6.28-11-generic
quiet

Save it and reboot for the changes to take effect.

I have verified this to work with Jaunty beta and usb_modeswitch. Unfortunately for me usbserial appears to have problems probing my modem's (ZTE MF627) capabilities. But at least I am a step closer...

I hope this helps someone...