This means I can turn on internet sharing on the phone and get online from my laptop while on the Acela between NY and Boston, without the tether cable.

I’ve got a Dell Latitude D810, running Kubuntu Feisty Fawn, and a cheap IOGear USB Bluetooth adapter, model #GBU221.

The “bluetooth” package in the Ubuntu universe repository is a metapackage which installs the “bluez” utilities – I have that installed as well.

All I had to do to get online via Bluetooth connection was:

1. Start bluetooth on the blackjack, since I don’t normally leave it running
2. Start internet connection sharing on the blackjack
3. On the laptop, do: hcitool scan (this looks for nearby bluetooth devices – note the address of your phone, which is a hexidecimal string like 12:34:56:78:90:ab)
4. Issue the command: sudo pand -c
   
   , using the address discovered above
5. Issue the command: sudo dhclient bnep0

Of course, once you know your phone’s address you can skip step 3.

I also tried the various instructions for tethering to USB and using the Gnome PPP application, but for me this would connect and automatically disconnect. Bluetooth’s preferrable for me anyway as that way I have one less cable to carry.