Galaxy S (“T-Mobile Vibrant”) Tethering

Seeing Tim Bray’s post on how much he loves tethering his Nexus One reminded me that I wanted to document that this does, indeed, work on a rooted Galaxy S. The day after I wrote up my experience with [STRIKEOUT:hacking]fixing my Galaxy S , I left for a four day trip to Washington, DC. The trip was great, but the best part was not paying for wifi at Washington Dulles while I waited for my return flight. Because I had rooted my phone (ridiculously easy these days; go, do it, even if you don’t apply the other fixes), I was able to install android-wifi-tether (2.0.5-pre8, to be specific). For some reason the Galaxy S doesn’t work in infrastructure mode yet, but after setting up a connection profile with a static IP in the correct range (192.168.2.x, by default), setting the gateway (192.168.2.254, by default) and Google’s DNS servers (they’re easy to remember), I was able to get right online.

I love the graph of the stock price of navigation companies when Google announced they were doing turn by turn navigation for free. I wonder if we’ll ever have the joy of seeing a similar graph for Boingo, et al. Probably not — there will still be lots of people with devices that only have a wifi chipset — but a guy can dream.