Vodafone and MMS in Australia

Hardware Librem 5
1

Hi all

I’ve returned to my Librem 5 after almost 12 months away. It appears that it has improved significantly in that time. Time will tell, but for now it looks promising.

I can’t seem to get MMS messages working in Chats however. I’ve tweaked some settings and thought I was making progress as the phone downloaded what was “expired” MMS messages going back to 2024, probably from my last try at this.

Are there any people in Australia who has Chats working with Vodafone?

Do I need a different messaging app?

Thanks to anyone who takes time to reply.

2

Are you on PureOS version Byzantium or Crimson?

3

I assume Byzantium if thats what was around two years or so ago and Crimson is the latest. The only thing I’ve done to it is update the modem firmware about 12 months or so ago. Other than that its pretty much as I bought it.

4

I think the thing that determines if MMS will work or not for a given carrier is the APN settings for that carrier. MMS can work if the carrier uses the same APN for data and MMS. But some carriers require a different APN for MMS, and then it will not work.

I think that making it work when different APNs are needed should be possible, but things need to be implemented first for that to work. It has to do with these issues:

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5

Thank you for those links. Probably above my skill level with mobiles, but it is something to research.

I’m keen to see if anyone has managed it in Australia with Vodafone.

6

From my research it appears that Vodafone have the same APN settings for both mobile and mms so this may not be the issue. I get differing results for proxies, mmsc etc. There are a lot of combinations of things to try. I’m pondering if actually ringing Vodafone would help.

But since I last used this L5 it has improved (on the Vodafone network at least). Last time I used it it wouldn’t receive texts from people unless I had texted them first. That appears to be fixed now. Likewise before people couldn’t ring unless I’d rung them first. I’ll be testing that aspect tomorrow.

The problem with not being able send or receive mms is that if someone tries to send say a picture, I don’t get the text at all which is a pain. But I’ll keep batting on with thus mms thing.

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7

One thing to try here is to enable debug logging for ModemManager, then I think you will probably see that there is a message arriving to ModemManager but then something goes wrong (hopefully with some interesting error message) so the message that arrived to your phone never makes it to chatty.

Look at the log using the sudo journalctl command.

8

Ok. I’ll get to that tomorrow as I’m off to work now. How donI enable debug logging? This is getting into an area I’m not totally conversant with, but I’ll have a go

9

First you can do systemctl status ModemManager and from the output there you can see where the ModemManager.service file is located, something like /usr/lib/systemd/system/ModemManager.service

Then you can edit that ModemManager.service file, find the line that looks like this:

ExecStart=/usr/sbin/ModemManager

and change that line so that it looks like this:

ExecStart=/usr/sbin/ModemManager --debug

Then reboot. After that, you should see lots of ModemManager debug output in the log shown by the journalctl command.

See HKS not working properly on Librem 5 (L5) - #2 by Skalman

(Another way of debugging (an alternative to the above) is to stop the ModemManager service altogether and then instead simply run the command ModemManager --debug manually from the commandline. Then you get the debug output right there, in your face.)

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