Jonny’s Blog

I am currently subscribed to the SynCE-WindowsMobile5 mailing list and have been for quite a while. The reason for this is I want my Windows Mobile 5.0 running Smartphone to work under SynCE in linux, so I followed the development of this new driver. Everything was pretty radical with this version as Activesync used the RNDIS protocol with WM5 instead of a serial connection in earlier versions of WM. Background information over…

A week ago or so, the following was sent to the mailing list:

Hi all,
Thought this might be of interest to those of you having one of those PXA-based PDAs (which rndis_host currently doesn’t cope with because of their buggy USB client implementation):
usb switch is an app for the wm5 device that changes the USB sync protocol from RNDIS to Serial
let me find the link
http://www.pcdebolso.com/notVer.asp?ID=1351
it’s in portuguese though
the direct link for download
http://t005.tgv.net/USBSwitch_PPC.cab
Which means you should be able to use the ipaq driver and access your device the legacy way. If this works there’s probably a few of you owing le0n a beer.
Regards,
Ole André

This was interesting, but not that interesting as my device had an OMAP processor inside. However, after only just realising that I had compiled USB1 support out of my kernel, but leaving in USB2 (was really confusing!), I was able to get linux to see my device and I thought I would take the plunge and try it out. However, there were a few things against this whole idea:

• This app was for Pocket PC. However, this didn’t put me off too much, as I remembered reading somewhere that the difference between Pocket PC and smartphone apps was getting trivial.
• This app was to fix problems concerning devices with Intel processors, and I didn’t have one!
• My luck!

So first, I followed the HOWTO on the SynCE website. This was fairly simple and required a few apt-get install’s to install required stuff, like synce-serial. Everything seemed fine, as I steamed through the HOWTO, ticking off all the boxes! Then I reached part 6.4 and realised that I had not read the first part properly- I needed a patch on my kernel. However, this seemed pretty normal, as it was for smartphones and after all, this is a smartphone! This is where it all goes kaput- I download the kernel-2.6-driver but it can’t compile- I think it’s something to do with my kernel being too new (2.6.17 is a 2-3 days old). This is my luck kicking in. Now I’m not sure where to go from here. The output from make is here, and if anyone can help I’d much appreciate it!

I certainly know of one other person who would gain something from this working!