iPhone Tethering on Ubuntu USB & Bluetooth

If you’re like me you have an iPhone and a portable computer running Ubuntu and you would like to have mobile internet without paying for an extra data plan from your carrier. Thanks to a few devoted individuals tethering the iPhone to Ubuntu is simple. The only prerequisite is that you must have an iPhone 3G or 3GS running OS 3.0 or higher. If you’re running 3.0 then you can do this without jail breaking your phone by installing a modified carrier profile. However, if you’re on OS 3.1+ then you will need to jail break your phone to install the modified carrier profile.

This tutorial is written for those who are not familiar with Ubuntu/Linux and is very detailed. If you are experienced feel free to just grab what you need from it.

Tether via Bluetooth:

Tethering the iPhone via Bluetooth is as simple as pairing the two devices and ensuring that Internet Tethering is turned on on your iPhone. To pair the devices you will need to install a new Bluetooth manager aptly named “blueman” from the Blueman Project PPA repository. To do this you will need to execute the following commands in a new Terminal window:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:blueman/ppa
sudo apt-get update

After it finishes updating your repositories you can install Blueman by executing

sudo apt-get install blueman

Once everything stops working and you’re back at a blank command prompt you can then close Terminal and open the “Bluetooth Manager” which can be found in the “System>Preferences” menu. (Note: A reboot may be needed for it to open) To pair the devices you will need to turn on Bluetooh on your iPhone and computer. To turn it on on your iPhone open the Settings application from your springboard, when the settings screen appears press the “General” button near the bottom, from here press the “Bluetooth” button, and then press the switch to turn it on. Once on you should see a list of devices as well as a message near the bottom saying that it is “Now Discoverable”. In the “Bluetooth Manager” program press the “search” button and the list should be populated with nearby discoverable Bluetooth devices. Locate your iPhone 3G(S) from the list, select it, and press the “Keys” (pair) button above it. At this time Bluetooth Manager will attempt to pair the two devices. On both the iPhone and your computer you should see a prompt asking you if you want to pair the two. Press “Pair” on your iPhone and “Yes” on your computer. Once paired, press the diamond on Bluetooth Manager to trust your iPhone.

Now that everything is set up, you can go back into the “General” tab on your iPhone’s settings and select “Network” near the bottom you should see “Internet Tethering” (if you don’t then you need to install the proper carrier profile to enable it) press on it and turn it on. Lastly, go back to the Bluetooth Manager program on your computer, right click on your iPhone and select “Network Access Point” from the option “Connect to:” it will work and hopefully give you a “Connection Established” message. Your iPhone should now have a blue banner with “Internet Tethering” on it. If all went well, you should now be able to access the internet through your iPhone’s data connection.

Thanks to Sergey Stadnik Bluetooth tethering on 10.4 (Lucid) now works. According to him: “… right-click on the Blueman icon, select Plugins. Enable NMPANSupport plugin, press Ok.”

Tether via USB:

Tethering your iPhone via USB uses a iPhone Ethernet driver written by Diego Giagio. Paul McEnery has set up a PPA repository with the driver and it’s dependencies so there is no longer the need to compile both ‘libiphone’ and ‘ipheth’. The first step is to add the PPA repository to your Synaptic repositories. To do so, open a new Terminal window and execute the following command:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:pmcenery/ppa
sudo apt-get update

Once it finishes updating you can continue by downloading and installing the driver and the needed dependency:

sudo apt-get install gvfs ipheth-utils

When it finishes plug in your iPhone via USB, if internet tethering is enabled you should see a new interface pop up and a blue banner on your iPhone along with a dialog on your computer notifying you about a new ethernet connect. If not, check to see if tethering is enabled by opening the Settings application on your iPhone and navigating to “General>Network”, near the bottom you should see “Internet Tethering” (if you don’t then you will need to download and install the proper carrier profile) press on it and turn it on. Open up a browser and enjoy your mobile internet.

Hopefully, you ran into no errors with this tutorial. If you did let me know, or let me know if you ran into any error with anything else pertaining to it.

Get Free POP3 and SMTP access to Yahoo! Mail on Ubuntu

YPOPs! is an application that provides POP3 and SMTP access to Yahoo! Mail.

This application is more like a gateway. It provides a POP3 server interface at o­ne end to talk to email clients and an HTTP client (browser) interface at the other which allows it to talk to Yahoo! The same concept holds good for SMTP as well.It works with all know email clients like Outlook, Thunderbird, Evolution, Eudora etc.

Install YPOPs! for Ubuntu

First you need to add the following line to source list file by editing the /etc/apt/sources.list file

$sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list

Add the following line

deb http://tskariah.000webhost.com/ubuntu ubuntu main

Save and exit the file

Add the PGP public key for the new repository

$ wget http://tskariah.000webhost.com/t_skariah.asc.gpg

$ sudo apt-key add t_skariah.gpg

Update the source list

$ sudo apt-get update

Install YPOPs!

$ sudo aptitude install ypops

Re configure YPOPs! for Ubuntu

$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure -fgnome ypops

Other front-ends could be “dialog” (default), or “web”. The old /etc/ypops.ini would be saved as /etc/ypops.ini.bak

A dialog will popup with help for every option available .

Configuration note

– Don’t check the ‘Add a new account’ in the first step unless you have multiple yahoo accounts.

– If you’re installing YPOPs! on a LAN computer that acts as a router, replace the bind address 127.0.0.1 with the LAN address reachable by the other network PCs (192.168.1.1 or 10.10.0.1 for example).

How to start YPOPs! for Ubuntu manually

$ sudo /etc/init.d/ypops start

How to stop YPOPs! for Ubuntu manually:

$ sudo /etc/init.d/ypops stop

How to automatically start YPOPs! for Ubuntu at bootup

Use the configuration wizard.

How to remove YPOPs! for Ubuntu:

$ sudo apt-get remove ypops

Directory structure:

/etc/init.d/ypops – init script
/etc/ypops.ini – config file
/usr/bin/ypops – executable file
/var/log/ypops/ – log directory
/var/run/ypops.pid – pid file

WARNING: The log directory is readable by all. If the log-level is set to Advanced, YPOPs! would dump all the HTML pages there, which might contian private information.

Configuring Email Client (Mozilla Thunderbird)

If you want to configure Mozilla Thunderbird to access your yahoo email use the following steps

Click Tools-> Account Settings

Click Add Account button.

Choose Email account. Click Next

Type name and email address in the boxes. Click Next

Choose POP and type ‘localhost’ as the incoming server.

Depending on your preferences check or uncheck Use Global Inbox

Click Next. If your username is not already there by default, add it.

Click Next. Add the way you want your Account Name to look in Thunderbird.

Click Finish.

Now scroll down to the bottom of the Account Settings pane and click on Outgoing server (SMTP).

Click on Advanced. Click on Add.

Type 127.0.0.1 as the outgoing mail server. Port default is 25.

Check Use name and password. This is Thunderbird’s way of enabling authentication.

Type your Yahoo user name as username.

Click No to Use secure connection and then OK twice.

Click OK to the Server Settings window.

Now get back into Account Settings

Go back to the Server Settings of you Yahoo Account in the Account Settings pane.

Do not check Use secure connection (SSL) or Use secure authentication.

Click on Advanced.

Choose where you want your emails to go in the POP tab.

Click on the SMTP tab and click on the drop down menu and select 127.0.0.1:25

Continue modifying any of your preferences in the account and then click on OK.

The first time you try to access the account, Mozilla will ask for a password and if you want Mozilla to remember the password.

Running iTunes on Linux

I bought  iPhone 3G  long back and in order to use the phone I needed to use Apple iTunes. Nomally iTunes and Ubuntu is a no-go, however using the latest wine from the Ubuntu it is possible out of the box – I’ really impressed of the wine project.

What you need
Check that you got the at least the following wine version:

$ dpkg -l | grep wine | awk '{ print $2, " ",$3}'
wine             1.1.29~winehq0~ubuntu~9.04-0ubuntu2
wine-gecko    1.0.0-0ubuntu1

If not, then install wine:

$ sudo aptitude install wine wine-gecko

Then download iTunes 8.x or Google it 😀 (important to download version 8.x otherwise it doesn’t work out of the box)

$ wget wget http://appldnld.apple.com.edgesuite.net/content.info.apple.com/iTunes8/061-6717.20090715.XsE4R/iTunesSetup.exe

Then just run the install process
$ wine iTunesSetup.exe
And finally start iTunes.