Ubuntu - USB Tethering with the Google Pixel

Situation:

When I connected my Google Pixel to my Ubuntu (14.04) laptop with the USB cable and selected the option to USB tether on the phone the connection would fail. The Network Manager applet would show a greyed out option "Ethernet Network (Google Pixel)" with the status "disconnected" underneath it, also greyed out.

Interestingly running "ifconfig" revealed that a "usb0" section was present but no IP address had been assigned.

usb0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 32:a8:e6:6c:fe:9d  
          inet6 addr: fe80::30a8:e6ff:fe6c:fe9d/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:5 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:13 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 
          RX bytes:560 (560.0 B)  TX bytes:1802 (1.8 KB)

This clue led to a long trawl across the internet that led to a surprisingly simple solution.

Solution:

Install the "dhcpcd" package.

sudo apt-get install dhcpcd

Now after connecting the Google Pixel simply run:

sudo dhcpcd usb0

And confirm by running:

ifconfig usb0
route -n
ping -c3 www.google.com