Jonny’s Blog

Looking at these instructions for SynCE just sickens me. I really want to strongly suggest one doesn’t follow the instructions, but not only does it look as if I’m too late, it also highlights how horrible the SynCE documentation is. Currently the new docs are stored in a less-than-finished docbook file in Subversion: http://synce.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/synce/trunk/synce-docs/. If you’re good with Docbook and want to help, email me.

On other SynCE notes, the new site is ready, but the docs are preventing me using the site.

Debian BBQ tomorrow. Lack of laptop means lack of general communication.

Right, exams are now over so I have more time to concentrate on other things.

I have a list of things I’d like to do over the summer. I won’t go into them as I don’t want to be tied to anything in particular, but it includes numerous Bongo enhancements, other SynCE stuff, finally some maemo developing, and also some Debian-specific stuff.

I’ll blog about any specific developments in the future though.

There are a number of advances that SynCE has undertaken, and more to come!

Done:

• New release (obviously)
• New logo
• Repository clean-up: I spent a while today moving lots of things round, creating new branches, and deleting a lot! It is much more accessible now. This took quite a few commits, and as a result, SynCE and myself got on the 9th most active project, and 8th most active author respectively, of the day, on cia.vc!
• Debian packages of Subversion versions
• Bug tracker clean-up

Coming soon:

• New website: The current wiki is straining and is becoming more complex I believe. The new website, although still a wiki, will have a slightly different purpose, as explained in the next point.
• New documentation in docbook form: Instead of putting installation instructions in the wiki, a docbook documentation module will be set-up. This is good because the source will be in svn and all the different formats (HTML, PDF, RTF, TXT…) can be built nightly. It will also be much cleaner than in a wiki, and another great advantage is that one can read it off-line. I will create a very easy-to-follow guide for people to contribute to this documentation though.
• New release into Debian: voc has agreed to sponsor release packages into Debian. Now that 0.10.0 is out, I can start working on these.

A new version of SynCE is finally out, after roughly a years wait!

This is the first version that supports Windows Mobile 5 out of the box!

Debian packages will be provided soon, and should be uploaded into Debian soon too.

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!