When I am on the road sometimes its very handy to have internet around.

luckily this is very easy to accomplish in Linux. In this case I will be using a Samsung F700 Mobile phone connected to my Asus EEE 701 laptop running Ubuntu linux.

A few things however to think of before you start:
– Do you have a ‘unlimited’ or limited (100MiB/1GiB etc..) contract (‘unlimited’ is recommended)
– Does your provider allow dial up using your phone & laptop (By Vodafone it is not allowed but if you use it for ‘normal’ web browsing they don’t mind (if you start using it to download your latest TV episode’s or whatever you will be shutdown.)

So lets start:

First connect the phone to the laptop using the USB cable in my case the phone will ask me in what ‘mode’ the phone should operate, I need to select ‘pc studio’ to use the phone as a gateway to the internet.

Now when the phone is connected to the PC open a terminal and run wvdialconf to create a new config file:

As you can see it found my Samsung F700 phone and updated the wvdial.conf file.

Now we need to edit the wvdial.conf file to add a few paramaters (user/pass & dial number)
the default config file looks like this:

Now you will need to know the ‘Target Phone Number’ for vodafone in the Netherlands this is ‘*99#’ but this might be different in your case so just ‘google’ around if you have a other provider for the target phone number.

The username and password can be just random but I like to keep it simple and changed both to ‘vodafone’

Also you need to enable ‘stupid mode’ in wvdial to work around some of the ‘intelligence’ in wvdial to get it to work.

So vi the wvdial.conf file and it should look like this:

Now you are ready to go, so start ‘wvdial’ and you should be connected (I created a desktop terminal launcher with the command: ‘sudo wvdial’ for this).