YiBi's Life|Live Log

I missed out something important in my previous post on the native tethering on Linux. Turns out my tethering works only after I kick off the tether from Windows (Which resides in a VM on my machine). Further digging led me to the following site.

http://giagio.com/wiki/moin.cgi/iPhoneEthernetDriver

In order to get tethering to work, you need to ‘pair’ the IPhone with your machine. The site above provides the source to the pairing program, which surprisingly isn’t part of any Debian package. Or at least I couldn’t find it. Someone please point me to the right package if there’s one.

Anyway, just follow the instructions on the site to checkout the source from GIT and compile ipheth-pair. Plug in your IPhone and check your dmesg for the following:

[40883.744096] usb 2-1: reset high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 10
[40883.905582] ipheth 2-1:4.2: Apple iPhone USB Ethernet device attached

Run ipheth-pair if your IPhone has been picked up and loaded successfully.

Leave the rest to Network Manager. Just connect to wwan0 like connecting to any other devices.

For some reason, I can get tethering to work natively on Linux after I did an upgrade on my unstable Debian.

This was not possible previously. Now the kernel detects a new device called ipheth (IPhone USB Ethernet device). This is the magic that made the tethering possible. And the best part is that it works out of the box with Network Manager.

This is really cool. I used to tether from Linux using Bluetooth, but the connection is unstable sometimes.

Screenshots of dmesg output etc. Click for the full size image.

I’m running the unstable distro of Debian, so I’m not sure if this is available on the stable release. It might be possible on Ubuntu, since they get all the cutting edge stuff.