Windows Mobile sync's with Linux!

A major battle has been fought and won today ... Okay it wasn't a major battle but one that I needed to win anyway. Today I managed to get my Pantech Duo+ to be recognized by Ubuntu and not lose my wireless connection! First I went to the Synce On Ubuntu wiki page and followed their directions for Gutsy (I recently upgraded to Gutsy from Feisty). After I followed their directions I was getting a rather odd error when I attempted to run pls (pls: symbol lookup error: pls: undefined symbol: rapi_connection_from_name). After some confusion, I performed a software upgrade and a newer version of related software was upgraded. I now no longer had that error but I could connect to my Duo and have the WiFi up. Network Manager would allow one or the other (argh!). So I left my WiFi up and instead manually configured eth1 like so sudo ifconfig eth1 169.254.2.2. I then performed a ping -c 3 169.254.2.1 (ping 2 times), it worked! Then I tried pls again and got:

    $ pls
   Directory               2003-01-01 12:00:10  My Pictures/
   Directory               2003-01-01 12:00:10  My Ringtones/
   Directory               2005-05-09 01:00:32  Templates/
   Directory               2008-01-07 15:55:14  My Videos/
   Directory               2008-01-18 17:15:32  Notes/
   Archive        1023380  2008-02-15 23:00:40  GoogleMaps.CAB

I'll now attempt to get the Contacts and Calendar information from the Smart Phone. So far I am pleased with the phone but I'm amazed at how poorly the Microsoft Activesync works with my Windows XP. I can only get the Smart Phone to be seen by XP only once in a while. I've tried it with Outlook, without Outlook, with WiFi, without WiFi, etc. Activesync would start, recognizing that I plugged in the phone but failed to find the phone. The diag. tool that comes with Activesync (4.5) never finds the phone. Linux sees it all the time, as either a rndis_host or a ttyUSB0 depending on the connection settings in Windows Mobile. I'll need to work on the Activesync problem as I need to keep my work schedule on the phone. It will be nice to be able to back it up to Linux and maybe even transfer the information to Linux so I can add it to some kind of Calendar Software under Linux.

HA presentation to LUGIP

I did my home automation presentation to LUGIP (Linux Users Group in Princeton) last night (the presentation is here). This presentation differed a bit from the previous presentation as it was more based on Linux than a general HA presentation. In my opinion it went well. It went much smoother than the previous version. There was still that one gentleman sleeping in the same chair as the previous presentation. The beginning of the presentation used the same material but I didn't delve into all the technical details of the protocols (but I forgot to mention the speed). I also got into presenting a little of Misterhouse and presented my coffee pot and alarm clock. That part needs a little more work but it went over well. I'll touch up the presentation and add a few more notes (they're missing). This should be the same presentation I give to the LILAX folks in April (the 19th). In the mean time I'll be working on the Trenton Computer Festival (TCF) presentation. That one will be more difficult to do as it needs to have Misterhouse working on my laptop and integrated with the doll house that we are building. I hope to have the external items such as the Insteon Lamp modules, appliance modules and wall switches working and integrated into the mix.