Blackberry Storm Tethering Ubuntu 9.04 and Dell Studio XPS

Yeah, baby.  Got my new DELL Studio XPS working with my Blackberry Storm.  A little bit of futzing and now I’m blogging from verizon 3g.

Note: Dell Studio XPS from Best Buy does not have Bluetooth enabled.  You have to use USB.  Doesn’t matter that’s really the only way to go with tethering as BT drains the battery…

Here’s how to do this:

Get barry from Net Direct.

(there’s an ubuntu binary package, they link to the repository.  just add it to synaptic and you can get all of barry)

once you get barry installed.  edit /etc/ppp/peers/barry-verizon.

just change the top part for user and password:

user “<yournumber>@vzw3g.com”

password “vzw”

and at the bottom with the pty line:

pty “/usr/sbin/pppob -P <devicepassword>”

If you didn’t set a password in your Options > security on your storm, you need to do that.

save your edits.

connect your blackberry.  when it prompts for mass mode, if it does. select YES.

go to command line and type: btools -l   if your Storm is listed, great.  if not, something is wrong.

if it’s connected, now you can connect to the interwebs:

sudo pppd call barry-verizon

This should work on all ubuntu 9.04 installs, not just DELL studio laptops.  I point out the DELL thing only because sometimes people search that way and sometimes there are weird things that you look for by model…

Speeds are really good with tethering this.

Also, I have to point out that the DELL XPS laptop is great with ubuntu.  Easy install.  only thing I’m futzing with is hibernate.  Everything else works out of the box.