Using a Treo 600 as a modem on Fedora Core 2

I run Fedora Core (2) on my laptop currently, since my old hard drive that had windows on it died, and I couldn't think of a good reason that I needed to put upwith Windows any longer.

I have a Treo 600, and I wanted to set it up to use as a modem for my laptop - using Sprint's PCS Vision service while on the road this is a very good deal for wireless, ubiquitous connectivity. I read around on the internet, and then set things up for myself.

Since I didn't find anything directly addressing what I wanted to do, I decided to write up what I did (surprisingly simple) and put it up here in case google ever gets around to indexing it and setting up as an answer to someone else out searching.

2004/07/15 Setting up PPP using Treo 600 for Linux

Plug in and detect the Treo

Plugging in Treo via USB sync cable, and putting Treo into Tethered mode (dial ##TETHERED from dial pad) and the Treo 600 is detected (watch /var/log/messages).

Two tty devices are set up:

Jul 15 19:20:04 dhalsim kernel: usb 2-1: Handspring Visor / Palm OS converter now attached to ttyUSB0 (or usb/tts/0 for devfs)
Jul 15 19:20:04 dhalsim kernel: usb 2-1: Handspring Visor / Palm OS converter now attached to ttyUSB1 (or usb/tts/1 for devfs)

The two TTYs that are most important here are /dev/ttyUSB0 or /dev/ttyUSB1. Most of what I read lead me to suspect that /dev/ttyUSB1 would be the tty that actually controls the modem portion of the treo.

Set up a PPP connection

Now I want to set up a PPP connection using RedHat's Network tool (Under the Gnome menu, System Settings->Network)

Create a new modem connection

Manually set it up to use /dev/ttyUSB1, 460800 baud rate

Set up the script to call #777

set up user and password as web/web - but this is not needed. In fact, I think I'll have to go back and delete it from whatever scripts are actually created, but the GUI needs values here to proceed (no good warning about needing them!) It turns out that wvdial (which the network tool uses to connect, not chat) only uses the user and password if it needs it, so I had no problem leaving those dummy values in.

I also have to go to the hardware tab, and edit the Generic modem to use /dev/ttyUSB1 - it was set up to use /dev/modem, which failed. Setting it to /dev/ttyUSB1 worked fine though.

Then clicking on the enable actually brought the interface up.

Pretty easy - this is the first time I've ever tried to set up ppp in linux even.

References

Here are the major references I used in trying to figure things out for myself. None of them were exactly what I was looking for (Treo 600 under Fedora Core 2 for someone who knows little about previous linux PPP setup) so I read a bunch, and then tried the obvious things.