Rob Garth
Mildly Useful Stuff

Lucid and iPhone tethering

May 7th, 2010 by robg

I am loving Ubuntu 10.04. It is a genuinely brilliant release.

It has very good iPhone integration too. What it is still lacking is some of the utilities to make tethering easy. For USB tethering you can you can use Diego Giagio’s ipheth driver. I haven’t yet found a PPA for lucid, so you will need to compile from source.

For Bluetooth Tethering, Ubuntu comes with a nice new version of blueman, but it does not have the tight integration with network-manager.

To install blueman:
# apt-get install blueman

Pair your 2 devices. Pairing between blueman and the iphone generally works (even when it says it failed).

The trick to getting the network tether to work everytime is by starting the connection from your iphone. Once bluetooth is connected you can then right-click on you phone in blueman and access the network-point.

Because blueman and network-manager are not integrated you need one final commnand:

# dhcliet bnep0

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2 Responses

  1. robg

    I have now discovered that the included version of Blueman has the plugin to throw everything to NetworkManager, it just isn’t enable.

    If you right-click on the blueman icon, you can edit the enabled plugins. Enable to PAN plugin, an no need for the dhclient step. Though I find the dhclient method more reliable.

  2. Geoff

    Thanks Rob

    But why do they make it so hard to get to work?

    I could not find a PAN plugin that did not knock out the network manaager integration so I have used the dhclient bnep0 command and that seems to work. At least it shows if the bluetooth conneciotn is working as it should.

    Thanks for the post.

    G

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