1) Connect a cable
2) Applications -> Settings -> Wireless controls -> Mobile network sharing
3) ifconfig -a and you will see the phone appear as a network connection with
4) sudo ifcofng usb0 up
5) sudo dhclient usb0
6) Surf away!

Ive seen idiots faffing around with openVPN rooting their phones and arsing about with the android sdk to do something that works out of the box. -.-’

It’ll work on most distros it depends only on the rndis_host and the rndis_wlan modules.

And yes this post was made through my eeepc tethered to my mobile.

Enjoy!