Comment Wifi tethering - requires rooting (Score 1) 125
I just looked into wifi tethering and got it working on my Samsung Fascinate last night in about 20 minutes. Open Garden is what I went with. I had already rooted my phone quite a while back to get a newer version of Android so that requirement was no problem for me. It was interesting to find that some wifi tether apps require you also to use a modified kernel. Neither Barnacle (mentioned above) nor Open Garden require a different kernel.
I passed 25MB down / 6 MB up over the course of a couple hours on the road browsing the web and reading email. No overheat issues, the phone was plugged in at the time. Overall the connection was far snappier than my experience trying to browse using the phone. The laptop I used runs Linux and I was using the latest Firefox and Thunderbird.