One of my favorite things to keep in my pocket is an Internet connection. Many, many times have I been ~1,500 miles from home in a rental car in a parking lot needing to get out an expense report (or wanting a quick deathmatch game). For this reason I search for a way to tether a mobile before I buy it as a prerequisite. My newest mobile, the Motorola Droid, was no different.

Here are the steps I took to get it working with Ubuntu 9.10 x64:

• Grab the latest Azilink archive and extract it: http://azilink.googlecode.com/
• Grab the latest Android SDK and extract it: http://developer.android.com/sdk/
• Set your Droid to debugging mode: Settings -> Applications -> Development -> USB debugging
• Install the .apk file onto your Droid. This can be done by pointing the Droid’s web browser directly to the download link or loading it onto the SD card. Either way you may need to go to Settings -> Applications -> Unknown sources to allow it to be installed.
• Install OpenVPN: sudo apt-get install openvpn
• Get your Droid vendor and product IDs by typing lsusb at the console. It should be easy to figure out which line is the Droid. Mine says “Motorola PCS” in it. You will see two four-digit hexadecimal numbers after the term “ID” and those are your IDs. The following is an example lsusb output:
  

  Bus 002 Device 005: ID XXXX:XXXX Motorola PCS

• Enter sudo gedit /etc/udev/rules.d/50-android.rules at the console and add the line
  

  SUBSYSTEM=="usb",ATTRS{idVendor}=="[vendor ID]",ATTRS{idProduct}=="[product ID]",MODE="0666",OWNER="[username]"

  replacing the the appropriate fields in brackets (also removing the brackets).

• Save the file and then reboot. [android SDK path]/tools/adb devices should show your device after this step.
• Create a file named resolv.conf and enter into it
  

  domain lan
search lan
nameserver 192.168.56.1

• Start up Azilink on your Droid and select Service active.
• Enter the following into the console:
  

  [android SDK path]/tools/adb forward tcp:41927 tcp:41927
sudo cp [path to file]/resolv.conf /etc/
sudo openvpn [path to azilink]/azilink.ovpn

You might want to pack some of these things into a shell script or something to make things easier for you. If all these steps went well you should be able to access the Internet on your computer via Azilink’s tethering capabilities. Be sure to check out the About screen in the Azilink application on the Droid to see if any of that applies to you.

A few things worth mentioning: This method does not require your Droid to be rooted. I am running Ubuntu 9.10 x64, Droid firmware 2.0.1, OpenVPN 2.1 RC19, and Azilink 2.0.2.

Update 2010.05.10
These steps have also been tested to work on Ubuntu 10.04.