Ubuntu hotspots

Have you ever managed to set up a wireless hotspot on your Ubuntu 11.10 computer?

It should be easy - the code to do this was added to 11.10 - except that, marked fix released or not, this bug applies.

Interestingly, it seems that this fully updated netbook has 0.9.1.90-0ubuntu5.1 rather than 0.9.1.90-0ubuntu6

The reason for wanting to do that..

.. is that I am somewhere where there is no wifi but I can plug an ethernet cable into the netbook. I'd also like to use shiny, which means using mobile data unless I can set up the hotspot.

What TalkMobile say they will do on PAYG Essentials: give sell you up to 25Mb per calendar day for 25p. "You will be notified by text message when you are approaching the fair use policy threshold and advised that charging will apply if this threshold is exceeded."

What they actually do: sell you 25Mb per etc, and charge you £1/Mb after that. Then send you a text to say that all your credit has gone.

Fortunately, there is a CarphoneWarehouse here and the nice assistant went 'He is right..' a lot as the person on their customer services reckoned that what they said was that they might, if they felt like it, send you a warning text. ('May' is the word they thought should be there.)