Friday, July 30, 2010

Tethering your Blackberry Tour with Ubuntu 10.04

I got a new Blackberry 9630 Tour handset from Reliance. Since this phone is a 3G phone and supports EVDO, I wanted to see if I could use this as a modem in place of a separate USB modem from Reliance. Tethering under Windows is well supported by the Blackberry Desktop Software but under Ubuntu, we dont have this luxury!
So I embarked upon a journey to tether the Tour to my laptop running Ubuntu 10.04. I had two options; USB cable or Bluetooth. I couldnt make the cable work using barry-utils though it helped me take backups etc. I then discovered that someone had found a way to make tethering work using bluetooth. I followed the instructions in this link--> http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1476009 . It involves installing an application called blueman. Once installed, the app lets you pair the Tour and also add enable dialup networking. Having done this, I created a new connection under Mobile Broadband in Network Manager and filled up the username + password (the reliance phone number itself). After saving, I could see the Connection available on Network Manager. On clicking, it immediately connected and I was ready to surf!