Guide: iPhone 3G Tethering on Linux Mint or Ubuntu
One of the reasons that I was quite reluctant to move over to Linux from Windows was the ease of tethering Internet connection from my iPhone. In Windows, all you need is to install iTunes (which would install the required drivers) and voila, all you need is just enable tethering on your iPhone and connect the USB cable to your PC. That’s it!
However, thankfully there’s the Bluetooth PAN option as well for tethering. And since the iPhone uses the standard Bluetooth PAN for sharing it’s Internet connection, this should also work with any other platforms as well!
But one can only wish that someone would just make it a lot easier to get this done in Linux. Initially, I tried to use the default bluetooth manager to try and get the bluetooth PAN to work to no avail. Instead, here are the steps I used in order to get it working on my Linux Mint 8 machine.
Firstly, the Bluetooth manager that is installed with Linux Mint needs to be replaced with the Bluez version.
sudo apt-get install bluez-compat
Once that’s done, here’s what you need to configure to get it working. Firstly, edit /etc/default/bluetooth to include the following lines
PAND_ENABLED=1PAND_OPTIONS=”–role=PANU”
sudo /etc/init.d/bluetooth restart
iface bnep0 inet dhcp
You’re almost there now! Next, let’s start pairing the iPhone with your machine. Just use the Bluetooth manager’s pairing wizards and get it over with. The idea here is to get the iPhone and your machine to allow each other to connect. Once that’s done, I’d suggest creating a shell script for starting up and shutting down the tethering session.sudo pand –connect 00:aa:bb:cc:dd:ee -nsleep 1sudo ifup bnep0
sudo ifdown bnep0sudo pand -K
When I enter sudo /etc/init.d/bluetooth restart
I get the following message:
bluetoothd compatibily daemons not started, see bluez-compat package.