Simon wrote:
Hi there,
i've recently acquired a pda (htc tytn) and a good data plan. Right
now, i can access the internet from my computer by setting up the
phone as a wifi ad-hoc station, but this takes so much battery, it's
not the optimal setup.
What i would need is to use the usb cable to connect to the cell
modem. But I'm a bit lost as to what to do... the documents i found
on this don't seem to talk about the same things (there seems to be
many ways of doing this...?) and many are out of date...
I was wondering if any of you could give me a general idea of what i
need (specially if you could clarify whats the best vocabulary to use
in google) or confirm what I found so far...
From what i understand, I believe i will need some kind of kernel
module (device driver) which will turn the usb device into a
networking interface. Then I think i would setup some kind of
connection normally (is it PPP? or something else?). The cellphone
would also need to be setup to share its data connection to usb (but
this seems quite simple... the linux part is the problem).
You do NOT need PPP, but you do need a fairly recent kernel (>= 2.6.27
at least, not sure of the details). You need at least
CONFIG_USB_RNDIS_WLAN as m or y. With udev and 'm' things work mostly
automatically on the linux side. On the phone you enable advanced
networking (or else you will see the phone as ttyUSB? and you will need
ppp). Then you plug in and run "dmesg -c" until things quiet down. You
should see a new eth? interface. Enable internet sharing on the phone,
and you should see in "dmesg -c" that your new ethernet interface
disappears and reappears. If it does not reappear your kernel is too
old. On my gentoo box i can now start the interface like a regular
ethernet interface. I have a debian box with a kernel from unstable
where dhcp fails on the phone 'ehternet' device, so I have to do "ip
addr add" and "ip route add" manually to get the network going (somehow
the ifup command on debian prints the assigned ip and the gateway ip,
gut does not configure the device properly). Do some googling to fill in
the details, I'm not using this regularly.
