I was wondering if it is possible to connect to the internet in Haiku by tethering with my android phone because there are no drivers for my ethernet or wifi card. I thought that maybe the usb device would appear as a network adapter in the preferences when I plugged in my phone, but this does not seem to be the case.
Via an USB connection, nope, as Haiku don’t have a working modem dialup support yet.
But via wifi - Android can act as an hotspot point - sure. Well, when your wifi card will be supported, that is :-
The USB cable can still be useful : to keep your phone battery charging while serving as a private wifi access point.
Anyway, please file an enhancement ticket requiring support for your wired and wifi cards. There is more probability that Haiku can support them sooner than dialup, I fear.
Haiku would need to implement Microsoft’s RNDIS into the network stack, something which some OS’s like Linux and Windows have done but many others like FreeBSD haven’t.
I don’t know how complex the framework is or how difficult it would be to implement into Haiku but I don’t think it would be high on the to-do list right now.
A wrapper like PdaNet could be written, but that would take a lot of work too.
If you have a working wlan on your laptop you can use Android 2.3 as a hotspot 
Our network was down at home and we set up my girfriends HTC as a hotspot. Made changes in my config file (rename hotspot name on the phone without spaces, ad ‘_’ in stead) and I was up :D. Dind’t work for my girfiends Laptop with Windows 7 
phoudoin: Could you please elaborate on
Via an USB connection, nope, as Haiku don’t have a working modem dialup support yet.
?
I mean, why does it need modem dial-up functionality? Isn’t that something old and obsolete (thus, never to be implemented, and your post pointed it out too?).
At first I thought that some kind of an intermediate software layer for Haiku could be written which would do the following:
-treat pin X from USB device as pin Y in Cat-5 cable (Ethernet)
-act as an ethernet device supported by Haiku,
…and in a way treat the USB port as an ethernet port
But then I realised the difference between ‘device’ and ‘cable’, and that it might not be as simple, ie.:
-perhaps the voltages might be different
-Ethernet cable has different number of pins than USB (so it wouldn’t work with USB 1.0, I guess)
and then I stumbled upon this post:
where user Adek336 quotes the usb_asix driver and mentions ax88172,ax88178 usb to ethernet controllers and then the usb_ecm network driver (unfortunately the link no longer works).
I wasn’t sure if that was the solution, but then I’ve read on
https://community.newegg.com/archive_2007-2013/product_support/f/18/t/97319.aspx
that
The USB to Ethernet is a Ethernet Controller connected to a USB host device.
So it’s like a “External Ethernet Card” that uses USB as an interface, not a true “converter”
So I wonder whether there is such a USB device around, which inputs an Ethernet cable (cat5 cable) and outputs an USB signal that Haiku can read as an Ethernet device. As far as I understand, perhaps this solution would remove the need to write/port drivers for every ethernet card around and would provide Haiku with internet on any machine that supports USB (unless there already is device like that around, then I’d buy it).
Sorry for all of my slips and misunderstandings in the post. If you could point me in the right direction or some materials which could help me getting to grips with how these things work on Haiku, that’d be awesome.
All the best.
Android uses RNDIS for USB tethering, which currently isn’t supported in Haiku nor FreeBSD where Haiku pulls some of the code for its network stack.