Productivity Sauce

Dmitri Popov

The Android Market features a few tethering applications, so it should be easy to use your Android phone as a wireless modem. Well, that's how the theory goes, anyway. In practice, however, these applications require root access to your phone's system, so you have to "root" your phone before you can tether it. Rooting an Android phone is not for the faint of heart, though, and there is the ever-present risk of bricking your device. Meet Proxoid, a proxy server application that lets you use your phone as a modem without hacking its system. Making Proxoid work does require a few steps, but the entire process is simple enough even for uninitiated users. Here is how to make Proxoid work with an Ubuntu-based system.

Start with installing the Proxoid application on your Android phone from the Android Market. On your phone, navigate to Settings - > Application -> Development and enable the USB debugging feature. On your Ubuntu machine, create the 90-android.rules file:

gksudo gedit /etc/udev/rules.d/90-android.rules

Add the following line to it:

SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="0bb4", MODE="0666"

Save the file and quit the text editor. Download and unpack the latest release of Android SDK. Connect the phone to the Ubuntu machine via USB and start the Proxoid application. Open the Terminal, navigate to the tools directory in the Android SDK folder and run the following command:

./adb forward tcp:8080 tcp:8080

The proxy server should now be running, but to be able to use it with Firefox, you have to modify the browser's proxy settings. In Firefox, choose Edit -> Preferences and switch to the Advanced -> Network section. Press the Settings button in the Configure how Firefox connects to the Internet group. Select the Manual proxy configuration option, then enter localhost in the HTTP Proxy field and 8080 in the Port field. Press OK to save the settings and close the window. Now you can browse the Web using the created connection.

Comments

Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.

Disqus