To co-ordinate the efforts regarding this I've made a new garage project: https://garage.maemo.org/projects/mobilehotspot

(Though there is unlikely to be any sort of progress before the weekend)

I already wrote a script like this to run on my ubuntu netbook remix Samsung NC10, I think I already mentioned it on the forum, here it is on pastebin

http://pastebin.com/m3f11235a

When I have a phone I will test it but I feel that this should be no more complicated than;

1. Enable port forwarding on phone.
2. Connect laptop(s) and phone to an adhoc network, or configure phone to be an access point.
3. Manually configure IP address and routing of laptop(s) or install and configure dhcpd on phone to do this automatically.

This would be a great addition, having a portable hotspot have saved me many times. Specially when you have to get into a situation where you need internet access (driver downloading, WiFi testing) and have laptop that's newly formatted.

This is the tricky part, iptables_nat and other neccessary kernel modules (along with the iptables binary itself) are not available on the device. I'm right now trying to get the needed modules compiled

Compiling the iptables binary also seems to require more than just taking a source package from debian and running dpkg-buildpackage...

These are relatively easy issues to solve, nonetheless I think a nice UI and a deb package for installing all you need are inorder, hence the garage project...

has there been any progress with regards to this?

I have tried a few different approaches (and bunch of variations within) to get iptables_nat (and other required modules) working on the stock kernel, no luck...

iptables (the command) I managed to compile once, of course since the modules didn't work I couldn't test it...

To get at least some progress am now compiling custom kernel so that an usable UI can be made.

Of course having to flash custom kernel for getting this to at all work sucks for the end user, but hopefully that can be worked around later.

But of course when I flash the device with the custom kernel it won't boot...

Next weekend I'm offline and it's highly unlikely I have any time for this during the week (need to get some Real Work done)

Had some help (but still couldn't get it to work), those interested in what has been tried (this is just the latest try, plenty of similar approaches tried as well) see http://pastebin.com/mb0e869b

Working custom kernel managed https://garage.maemo.org/plugins/scm...=mobilehotspot

Not sure how much time I will have for the UI stuff this week though.