I recently posted on using a mobile phone’s data connection with Mac OS X, and I’ve just had some sucess with my new eee Linux based laptop, again on Vodafone (but I imagine other operators will be similar).

To dial up a connection, plug the phone in via USB and setup a new Dialup Connection in the Network Connections manager with the following information:

Phone number: *99***internet#
User name: web
Password: web

The difference here is that I’m putting the access point name in the number to dial, no doubt the script I was using on OS X was doing this for me. These settings worked on a plain vanilla eee PC without messing around in /etc/ppp. So that might vary operator to operator. Best of luck, please post in the comments if your process varied for other operators or devices.