Well today (last night really) was the first time I have had to use 3g on my cell phone ‘in anger’ as some would say. I have to say it has been amazingly easy, as you will see below.

Now to start with I am using an Acer Aspire laptop I bought a year or two ago with some random usb bluetooth dongle I had lying about. On the laptop is Ubuntu 7.10 and the device I am connecting to is a Palm Treo 750 with Windows Mobile 6 (yes the early release from AT&T).

For this you will require the bluez-utils package. (A guide to installing packages can be found here)

1. Login to the laptop (ok, this may seem obvious, but meh, there are not too many steps)
2. Insert random usb bluetooth dongle
3. Prepare the Windows Mobile device by going to Start->Programs->Internet Sharing
4. In the “PC Connection” dropdown select “Bluetooth PAN”
5. Press connect
6. On the laptop open up a terminal
7. Run ’sudo pand – - search’

There should now be a new device bnep0 which you can find by running ‘ifconfig bnep0′ on the terminal. You should now be able to use NetworkManager to select wired network and all is well. I will however mention at this point I have my ethernet card in the laptop manually configured so NetworkManager knows nothing about it, this may change how NetworkManager displays the device.

Now the reason I decided to bother posting something this simple is I had never had to do it before and I am sure last time I checked on Google I could not find anyone else who had either. This was amazingly easy and I gives me faith that technology is heading in the right direction. While no user should have to open a terminal this was a lot easier than the last time I had to do anything like this with my last phone and laptop and I think this could easily be added to NetworkManager or some other similar tool.
Finally while the laptop is currently running Ubuntu (and I love it, great work guys) because of a new project I want to get moving it is very soon going to be Fedora or CentOS based…watch this space.