Sprint PCS Merlin S620 EVDO Linux HowTo

Kyle Usbeck [www.cs.drexel.edu/~kfu22]

January 15, 2007

Update

There is a great Gentoo-Wiki modification of this HowTo.

Introduction

This article will document how to configure your linux machine to use a Sprint PCS Merlin S620 EVDO PCMCIA card. I'm using a fresh Ubuntu (Breezy) install. I mostly used how-to's on Verizon EVDO cards to get mine working so it's very possible that, if you have another card or you use another distro, you might still find this how-to helpful.

Pre-Setup

Some of the things I used:

• usbserial kernel module,
• wvdial and wvdialconf,
• pppd (and its accessories)

Setup

Configure usbserial module to autoload on boot. You want to pass it the args vendor=0x1410 and product=0x1110. If you have a different card, you'll want to find the product and vendor ID for your specific card. Reboot and make sure that the usbserial module loaded. Insert your EVDO PCMCIA card. Use dmesg to figure out the device file for the card, if you can't figure it out, don't worry about it too much, you should be able to figure it out in the next step. Type

# wvdialconf wvdial.conf

which will generate the file wvdial.conf. Move that file to the default location in /etc/

# sudo mv wvdial.conf /etc/

Now save the files:

• sprint
• sprint-connect
• sprint-disconnect

in the directory /etc/ppp/peers/

Edit the file, sprint, to reflect your 10-digit phone number.

You do not need to specify the password, just the 10-digit phone number.

Running

Setup the device file by typing

# wvdial

which should inevitably fail, but will setup the device file properly.

Finally, type

# sudo pppd call sprint

This should connect you to the network and give you an IP Address.

Feedback

I've received some very helpful feedback from a number of individuals.

Several people have experienced a "timeout" after being connected for a few minutes.

The following is a friend's solution to the timeout problem. Timeout Solution. Thanks Riberto!

Another solution to the timeout problem:

Add this line to /etc/ppp/peers/sprint

lcp-echo-failure 0

Thanks Tom!

About this document ...

Sprint PCS Merlin S620 EVDO Linux HowTo

This document was generated using the LaTeX2HTML translator Version 2002-2-1 (1.70)

Copyright © 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, Nikos Drakos, Computer Based Learning Unit, University of Leeds.
Copyright © 1997, 1998, 1999, Ross Moore, Mathematics Department, Macquarie University, Sydney.

The translation was initiated by Kyle Usbeck on 2007-01-15