I have an HTC Hero, an Android phone, for one year. But I never tried to share his network connection with my Debian laptop. To prepare my trip to Debconf10, I try it today and… I’m surprised because it’s so easy!
1. Plug your phone on USB
2. Active “Share your phone network” on phone (in french: “Partage du réseau mobile”)
3. You see now an usb0 ethernet device:
usb0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr a2:17:af:4f:fa:da BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 lg file transmission:1000 RX bytes:0 (0.0 B) TX bytes:0 (0.0 B)
4. Configure usb0 to have the network configuration 192.168.100.100/24 with your favorite tool (ifconfig for example).
5. Now you can ping your phone with 192.168.100.254. Use it as gateway and enjoy: your laptop is now connected with Wi-Fi, GPRS or 3G+!
Note: I use HTC Hero with Android 1.5 (build number: 2.73.61.5) and the french mobile phone provider Orange.