Nokia N78 as a modem on Ubuntu EasyPeasy

I recently managed to install Ubuntu Easypeasy by following these instructions, the other day. A week before I finally succeeded in doing this, I had spent a whole day googling to try and find out how to install this software. I always say that finding information on the internet is as much about being able to ask the right questions. However, that day I'd been unable to frame the question correctly, and every page I'd opened had been wrong. And yet a week later, 10 minutes googling provided the above information.

While I was doing the install, I'd noticed that one of the options for networking was Mobile Broadband, leading me to believe that it would be quite easy to connect to the internet should I ever get my grubby mitts on my dad's Mobile Broadband dongle! Not, you understand, that I've been coveting my dad's dongle, really, much...

However, I don't have one yet, but I do have a Nokia N78! I've been happily using this to connect to the internet (for emails and a tiny bit of really small screen web browsing) since last summer, but I've always wondered if there was a way to use the PC suite on the eeepc, and thus use the N78 as a Mobile Broadband dongle of sorts. Sadly, according to my brother, who works for Nokia, no one had made a version of the software to run on Linux yet, so I shelved my plans for a while. But this weekend I decided to re-visit the idea, and spent a while googling to find out if this was possible.

I came across a couple of posts which involved lots of sudo commands. This one, for the N95, looked extremely concise, so I thought I might have a stab at that later on. The problem is that it's been well over 20 years since I was comfortable with Unix command-line tinkering, so I was quite nervous to just trust that I'd be able to get it to work (although I did console myself with the fact that I've still got the usb memory stick with the linux distro on it, should I completely bugger it up). My unease stemmed from the fact that I didn't recognise the commands (and after more than 20 years, why the hell should I?) and didn't know what each of them were doing.

This, however, is what I did!

1. Right-click the network signal indicator (connected to my wireless lan at the time)
2. Edit Network Connections.
3. Click the Mobile Broadband tab.
4. Add new connection.
5. The wizard will guide you through. You have to select your mobile network provider. I'm with O2, of which I had a choice of 3 - O2 (contract), O2 (Contract-faster) and O2 (prepay). I chose O2 (contract-faster).
6. When you click Next at this point, you can give the connection a name. I called mine N78, and clicked Apply.
7. Connect the phone with your USB cable.
8. When asked on the phone, choose PC Suite.
9. This is where I fiddled a little, because there seems no easy way to say, "connect this way". In the end I disabled wireless, and edited my newly created connection to say "Connect automatically". A message came up asking if this connection could use the key password, so I clicked yes, and blow me down! It worked.

And all without having to crack open a terminal window, and scare myself with the command line!

One of the reasons I decided to note this down for you is that, apart from, hopefully helping someone with this, I had to comment that this is the sort of easy "plug 'n' play" stuff Microsoft have been trying to get working this well for years!

Edit: I have to make clear, if you haven't already worked it out, is that I'm quite blown away with Ubuntu Easypeasy. This whole story just shows how completely usable this distribution is. While I love blowing my own trumpet, it's very clear that it wasn't my cleverness which got the job done.