o2 E169 usb dongle to work on acer linux version

hi i am doing this on behalf of a friend i was wondering if anyone could help me out with the problem of the o2 e169 usb dongle to work on the acer zg5 laptop it nis one of those small laptops that are about now all i can say is that when you put it in the usb port it takes abit to find it then it opens up the files that are installed onto the usb dongle but if you try to get it to install the software it does nothing so is there some setting that i can go into to get the laptop linux software to let it work or is there some free software that i can get hold of that i can install to make it work and also is there any free firewall and anti-virus software that can be installed to protect it or is it ok  how it is i look forward to some reply of many of you cheers

Hi,

Generally these dongles come with 2 "modes", flash drive mode (the default) and modem mode (which is what you want to get online). Typically in flash drive mode, it contains the software Windows required to use the modem - as such, the software with neither install or run on Linux. (as it's Windows software ...)

A quick browse seems to indicate that your device is supported by the latest versions of Ubuntu (9.10) "out of the box" .. I suspect simply upgrading to a decent Linux distro (I'm assuming you have Acer's offering on your box) will solve your problems ..