How to connect laptop to iPhone (or other phone) hotspot

ivyfrankocean · 07-23-2022, 03:48 PM

Hey!

Picked up an older laptop (Dell Inspiron 5537) and put Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS on it.

I tried turning my cellular data and then hotspot on on my iPhone, and although I can see the '{{name}}'s iPhone' showing up as one of the networks I can connect to, when I try to connect it just says Wifi Connecting and then

connection failed
activation of network connection failed

I tried googling around but can't seem to find anyone who has done this successfully and posted about it.

All I'm aiming to do is to be able to pull out my laptop that is running ubuntu on the train/bus/whatever, connect to my iPhone hotspot and then actually do some work.

The same iPhone's hotspot is very easy to connect to when it's my Macbook connecting but over here for some reason it doesn't work.

Do I need to switch phones for this to work? If so, any recommendations on what phone to get? I would still need to use things like Instagram for business purposes.

TB0ne · 07-23-2022, 04:23 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ivyfrankocean

Hey!
Picked up an older laptop (Dell Inspiron 5537) and put Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS on it.

I tried turning my cellular data and then hotspot on on my iPhone, and although I can see the '{{name}}'s iPhone' showing up as one of the networks I can connect to, when I try to connect it just says Wifi Connecting and then
connection failed
activation of network connection failed

I tried googling around but can't seem to find anyone who has done this successfully and posted about it. All I'm aiming to do is to be able to pull out my laptop that is running ubuntu on the train/bus/whatever, connect to my iPhone hotspot and then actually do some work. The same iPhone's hotspot is very easy to connect to when it's my Macbook connecting but over here for some reason it doesn't work. Do I need to switch phones for this to work? If so, any recommendations on what phone to get? I would still need to use things like Instagram for business purposes.

Should work just fine, but without knowing what you're doing to try to connect it's hard to say. Typically, it's something with the connection parameters, such as a bad passphrase, wrong encryption type selected, etc. I can tell you that my openSUSE, Fedora and Mint systems have no problems connecting with my phones hotspot, so I doubt seriously whether it's a Linux issue.

ivyfrankocean · 07-25-2022, 09:14 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by TB0ne

without knowing what you're doing to try to connect it's hard to say. Typically, it's something with the connection parameters, such as a bad passphrase, wrong encryption type selected, etc.

Interesting. So I just now tried going into my laptop (ubuntu) settings -> select network -> WiFi settings -> gear icon to the right of "{{myName}}'s iPhone" -> Security and then I changed it from "WPA3 Personal" to "WPA & WPA2 Personal" and it started working!

Thank you so much for your help. Follow up question if you have time (feel free to ignore if you dont), is this a security issue now that I've told Ubuntu that my iPhone's hotspot is "WPA & WPA2 Personal" and not "WPA3 Personal"?

Thanks again, this is pretty awesome.

allend · 07-26-2022, 12:23 AM

There is an active discussion in the Security forum of WPA2 vs WPA3.
WPA2 is the best you can use if the hardware does not support WPA3. It is your data, so you need to do your own risk assessment.