Tethering from a mobile phone is not new to me. I started from the days of having to script the ppp chat scripts to wvdial to finally having Network Manager recognizing my mobile phone as a 3G modem.

IPhone is new. I have been reading about tethering on Linux as soon as I bought it. Painful ways, jailbreak, run proxy etc etc etc.

Linux didn’t recognize the IPhone as a modem when I plugged in via USB, so it’s only bluetooth now. I tried the tethering of my Mac first. With bluetooth, I found that tethering actually happens over the PAN (Personal Area Network). That should work with Linux, and so it did.

These are steps for me to get tethering on Debian in 5 mins.

1. Run “sudo aptitude -y install blueman” in Debian.

2. Logout and login again. This is for the dbus and stuff to react correctly when you turn on your bluetooth later on.

3. Turn on your bluetooth or insert your USB bluetooth dongle. A bluetooth icon should appear in your system tray or whatever you call it in Gnome. That’s Blueman.

4. Discover and add your IPhone in Blueman

5. Turn on Internet Tethering under “Settings –> General –> Network”. Choose Bluetooth.

6. Go back to your Blueman, click on it and you should see your IPhone. Right click on your IPhone and select “Network Access Point”

7. And you are done!

That’s it! Simple right? No hacking, no jailbreak!

Do drop me a comment if anything’s unclear. The same solution should work with any of the modern distros like Fedora and Ubuntu.

Related posts:

  1. Native IPhone Tethering On Linux (Debian)
  2. Update: Native Tethering To IPhone On Linux
  3. IPhone Tethering – Use and Abuse!
  4. Updating iPhone to iOS 4 in Vmware
  5. Why run Linux on Mac?