As I do not have a land-line phone, my current Internet connection at home is purely over my cell phone connection. I purchased a cable to connect my phone to the USB port and installed the drivers on my Windows laptop. After enabling Mobile-Web with Verizon (about $5 more a month), and using one of the many user-name and password combinations available around the Internet I was up and running. My connection is faster than standard dial-up and available anywhere I get signal which is most of the country. I wouldn't want to use it for big media downloads, but is works fine for general browsing and email. As the minutes I use get deducted from my calling plan, I don't spend much time using it anyway, unless, of course, I'm using my free evening and weekend minutes.
In any event, I'm not here to talk about that today. I've been using that connection for a while now, but what I needed to do today was get my linux box connected. Ideally, I'd hook it up to a cable broadband connection, but as it currently stands, I don't have one and it could be awhile before I'm hooked up. I also know that it could be a problem getting drivers to work with my phone in linux. Then I remembered that you can share a Windows Internet connection and figured I'd give it a shot. While researching the matter, the first problem I encountered was that everyone seems to use linux as the server and windows as the client. In my case the roles are reversed. After hooking up a Cat5 crossover cable between the two machines, I tried setting up a file share where I was sharing the files on the Windows box. I'm not sure what I'm missing but if anyone has any insight, please let me know.It worked like a charm once I installed Samba properly.
I did, however, get the Internet connection up with little difficulty. In Windows 2000 (XP may be a little different) I opened Start > Settings > Network and Dial-up Connections and right-clicked on my Verizon connection and selected Properties. After selecting the Sharing tab, I enabled shared access and made sure that On-demand dialing was enabled. That's it for Windows. Simple huh?
I'm running Ubuntu linux which comes standard with Gnome on my linux box. From the bar I selected System > Administration > Networking. I activated the Ethernet Connection and under Properties set the Connection to DHCP. After hitting OK I opened my browser and entered an address. The "Dialing..." dialog box appeared on my Windows box, and once I remembered to turn my phone on, I had a connection. That's all there was to it. I'm posting this from said connection.
