iPhone USB Ethernet Driver is a Linux Kernel driver that adds support for iPhone tethering through USB cables. Unlike other solutions out there, you don't need to jailbreak your phone or install third-party proxy applications.
Attention: The ipheth kernel module has been accepted upstream as of Apr 21 2010 for kernel 2.6.34. The following instructions for compiling and installing this module are deprecated, unless you want to use the module on an older kernel. You still need the pairing program for the driver to work. You can also pair your device by using the libmobiledevice utilities.
Devices supported
The driver was tested with iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS with firmware 3.0 or better. iPhone 2G with some patches is also expected to work.
What you need
You need both the kernel driver and an user-space program. The user-space program is necessary in order to do a handshake and pair the device with the computer, otherwise it won't respond to kernel driver requests and thus won't work.
I won't get into much detail here, but basically the pairing of the device can't be done at kernel level since it heavily makes use of XML (Apple PList's) and other certificates and crypto keys stuff.
You can pull the repository to your local machine by running:
git clone git://github.com/dgiagio/ipheth.git
Package dependencies
To build the kernel driver you only need the kernel source of your distribution. The pairing program is written in C and makes use of libiphone libraries from iFuse Project. As of Jan/01/2010 only the git version of libiphone library is supported!. You can find it on this git repository.
Step-by-step
Please note: I'm assuming the package dependencies outlined above were successfully installed.
* Retrieve the source:
diego@eeepc:~$ git clone git://github.com/dgiagio/ipheth.git
Initialized empty Git repository in /home/diego/ipheth/.git/
remote: Counting objects: 10, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (9/9), done.
remote: Total 10 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0)
Receiving objects: 100% (10/10), 8.11 KiB, done.
diego@eeepc:~$
* Compile and install the pairing program:
diego@eeepc:~$ cd ipheth/ipheth-pair
diego@eeepc:~/ipheth/ipheth-pair$ make
gcc -Wall -O2 ipheth-pair.c -o ipheth-pair -liphone
diego@eeepc:~/ipheth/ipheth-pair$ sudo make install
install -m 0755 ipheth-pair /lib/udev/
install -m 0644 90-iphone-tether.rules /etc/udev/rules.d
/sbin/udevadm control --reload-rules
diego@eeepc:~/ipheth/ipheth-pair$
* Compile the kernel driver:
diego@eeepc:~$ cd ipheth/ipheth-driver
diego@eeepc:~/ipheth/ipheth-driver$ make
make -C /lib/modules/2.6.28-15-generic/build M=/home/diego/ipheth/ipheth-driver modules
make[1]: Entering directory `/usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.28-15-generic'
CC [M] /home/diego/ipheth/ipheth-driver/ipheth.o
Building modules, stage 2.
MODPOST 1 modules
CC /home/diego/ipheth/ipheth-driver/ipheth.mod.o
LD [M] /home/diego/ipheth/ipheth-driver/ipheth.ko
make[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.28-15-generic'
diego@eeepc:~/ipheth/ipheth-driver$
* Load the module:
diego@eeepc:~/ipheth/ipheth-driver$ sudo insmod ipheth.ko
diego@eeepc:~/ipheth/ipheth-driver$
* Plug in your iPhone and check your dmesg for success:
diego@eeepc:~/ipheth/ipheth-driver$ dmesg
... lines stripped ...
[ 8181.461000] ipheth 1-6:4.2: Apple iPhone USB Ethernet device attached
[ 8181.463067] usbcore: registered new interface driver ipheth
diego@eeepc:~/ipheth/ipheth-driver$
At this point you should have a new ethernet interface on your computer. Mine is eth1, but your mileage may vary.
Now you only need a DHCP client and you are all set. Most recent Linux distributions ships with NetworkManager, and it works great. If you don't use it, just dhclient ethX, where ethX is your interface.
Product's homepage
What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]
· Added support for newer kernels (Ubuntu Karmic, Fedora 12, etc). Patches by Matthew Garrett
Find us on Google+
