Tagged : pre

My home Internet service was down last night, and I don’t yet have a broadband card for my recent Macbook Pro acquisition. (Any thoughts on the mifi?) To pass the time away till I was “back on the grid,” I spent the evening trying to get tethering working on my Pre.

I’ll cut to the chase… Not only was I unsuccessful, but in the end I somehow killed the Internet on the phone as well. Actually the Internet connection was still there, but the phone wasn’t able to resolve any DNS names.

In any case, here are some notes from my little experiment:

• Trying to hack a phone when the phone is your only Web connection *is* pretty hard. Firefox and tabs and multiple windows and cut-and-paste to Terminal is really necessary for this kind of stuff. Not recommended. Dig your well before you’re thirsty!
• There are some great resources out there for hacking the Pre, and to Palm’s (and maybe Sprint’s) credit, they have not been wasting good resources–and good will–fighting the community. (I’m giving Palm the benefit of the doubt on the whole PreDevCamp debacle.) The first stop for any aspiring Pre hacker should be the webOS internals wiki. There are lots of good resources posted there.
• “Rooting” your Pre is the first step for many hacks and is pretty easy to do. After rooting you get unfettered access to the Pre’s Linux operating system. Maybe I’m old-school, but it still amazing me that I can get a real Linux bash prompt from a device this small and sleek, and with such a good looking UI.
• I found some nice instructions on tethering here, but they didn’t work for me. After restarting the connection manager you are supposed to check to see that IP forwarding is enabled. When I checked it wasn’t. Not sure if this is 1.1 thing. Or not. It turns out in this case that the first Google result isn’t event the best way to go about tethering anymore…
• In search of answers, I found that a very cool homebrew tethering app has been developed, and I tried that out. My Tether can be found over on the preCentral forums (another great resource for Pre hackers) and is very slick. Installation is straightforward on a rooted device, but I can’t yet recommend it since it was at this point that I lost my connectivity. I’m not yet ready to blame my problems on My Tether, but proceed with caution.

It’s about this time, having lost my 2″x3″ portal to the Web, that I gave up. Earlier this morning, I went back into my rooted Pre, restarted dnsmasq, and rebooted the device. I could swear I did all that last night, but that’s all it took to get my on-device Internet working again.

I’m sure I’ll be trying this again sometime soon.