It’s only been a week or two since I tore open the delivery box that held my Asus 4GB EeePC, but I’ve been steadily impressed with the little machine. The EeePC accomplishes almost the impossible; it lives up to the hype. For only $399 ($389 shipped free from Buy.com with my Google Checkout discount), you’re given an incredibly versatile machine. It’s hard to believe that the little beast is only running at 667 MHz, clocked down from it’s native 900 MHz by Asus. I say that because even at 667 MHz, the EeePC tears ass. It’s barely broken a sweat from everything I’ve thrown at it so far; I wouldn’t be exaggerating if I said that it easily rivals my decked out 1.6Ghz Centrino Core Duo laptop. I’ve tried several OS’es on it so far, from Kubuntu, EeeXubuntu, and Fedora all the way to XP Pro. Somehow I keep coming back to the OS that it shipped with though, Xandros. Xandros does everything I need it to do, and it does it well.

The title of this article is “EeeVDO – EVDO on the EeePC,” so I suppose I should stop pimping the EeePC and get to the point. Despite the TERRIFIC WiFi capabilities of the EeePC, there are times when you may find yourself outside the coverage of an open access point. If you’re half the Internet junkie that I am, you’ll probably agree that that’s just unacceptable. To remedy this, I’ve done a little research and experimentation, and found that it’s as simple to tether my Samsung A900 “Blade” to my Xandros equipped EeePC (via USB) as it is to tether the A900 to my Vista equipped Core Duo laptop. Actually, it’s even easier (no drivers to install on the EeePC!).

[For those unfamiliar, "tethering" is the act of connecting a cell phone to a PC for the purpose of having almost global access to the Internet -- anywhere you can make a call, you should be able to get online too. Further, the A900 can utilize Sprint's high speed EVDO network, giving you broadband-like speeds while on the go.]

How did I tether the A900 to my EeePC? It’s easy… just plug it in using the USB cable that came with the phone. Okay, well, it’s not quite that easy. After plugging in your phone, the EeePC will recognize it as a serial modem though. There’s just three easy steps and you’ll be all set (these steps should work in both the default “beginner’s desktop” as well as the full KDE version of EeePC Xandros):

1. Create a dialup connection. Go into the network manager, choose to create a new connection (I named mine “EVDO” but you can name yours whatever you want), select “dialup” for the connection type, and then pick your phone out of the list of equipment to use as a modem. On mine, the A900 showed up as “Serial Modem” but you may either see that or possibly the make and model of your phone. Either way, you don’t want to use the Intel card option. When the setup wizard asks what dialup telephone number to use type “#777″ (no quotes). Although username and password must be blank to log on, the wizard won’t let you leave either field blank. We’ll come back to that, but for now just type in “123″ in all three fields and hit next. That should be it… for creating the new dialup connection. Before you can use it though, proceed to step 2.

2. Go back into the network manager and then access the properties for your new dialup. Once you’re there, find the tab that has your username and password information typed in (it should be “123″ right?). Clear all the fields. Again, you want username and password to be *completely* blank. Save your changes and get back to the desktop.

3. Last step. This one is important because even though you should be able to successfully dial in to your EVDO connection and browse now, the connection should also cut out unexpectedly after a minute or so. This is because by default Xandros is sending keep alive messages to your EVDO connection, expecting a message in return that lets it know that the connection is still active. Unfortunately, this is a PSTN (regular telephone dialup modem) feature that doesn’t work with EVDO. When Xandros doesn’t get an answer to the keep alive messages it’s sending, it freaks out and closes the connection. Somehow it also forced the phone to reboot itself as well (yeah, I have no idea how that happened). Anyway, we’re going to make a quick change to Xandros so it no longer messes with keep alives.

Open a terminal window (Ctrl + Alt + t). Type in “sudo kwrite /etc/ppp/options” (no quotes) and press enter. This will launch Kwrite, my favorite text editor for Linux. Kwrite will automatically open the file “options” from the “ppp” folder with administrative rights, allowing you to make a careful change.

Once the file is opened, we’re going to search for a specific line. Hold down Ctrl and press “f” to open a search window. Search for “lcp-echo-interval” (again, no quotes). Once you’ve found that line, comment it out by placing a “#” in front of it. The line should now look like this:

# lcp-echo-interval 30

Save your change and exit Kwrite. Open the network manager and go ahead and try to connect using your new EVDO dialup connection (make sure WiFi is off). Congrats, you can now feed your Internet addiction from just about anywhere!

A special warning: It’s absolutely IMPERATIVE that you have the unlimited data service added to your Sprint plan. It’s included with mine, but unless you want to get charged ungodly amounts of money for downloading while on the road, you MUST get the unlimited plan. I think it’s like an extra $15 – $25 if it’s not already included in your contract. If you have any question whether you have unlimited data (“Power Vision” as Sprint calls it), please save yourself some headaches and call Sprint to confirm it. If you don’t heed my warning, you may end up like this guy or this guy!