Windows Mobile and Linux

I wouldn't call Windows Mobile and Linux a match made in heaven, but I have to say that I'm impressed with the user support for Windows Mobile Devices under Linux.

I have an HTC Mogul, a phone I have a pretty strong relationship with because it allows me to keep organized. I have a great capacity for storing trivial knowledge, but I can't remember to grab a stack of papers before I leave for work in the morning if my phone doesn't beep at me to remind me to do so (and even then, I have to admit that I often still forget). I'd try regular PDA's in the past, but I never wanted to carry them around, so with my phone being my PDA, I'm more or less forced to keep it on me. Of course, you probably already know all the reasons why someone would have a 'Smart Phone', so I'll move on.

As I've mentioned, I've been a casual Linux user for years. I've run everything from Knoppix to Puppy, and SUSE to Ubuntu. Since the release of Ubuntu's Hardy Heron 8.04 in April, I've had it running on a partition on my laptop. I've used it off and on, impressed with a lot of the new features, and ease of use. I have to admit that overall, for a casual user, it has definitely moved leaps and bounds in the right direction, even my Toshiba's media keys, volume controls, and best of all FN keys were all supported right out of the box. However, there's still enough reason for me not to dump Windows completely, but I can imagine a scenario in the not too distant future when Linux might finally be ready for me to jump in full bore.

I'm a fairly savvy user, learning most of the day to day terminal commands years ago, and through plenty of tinkering, I've developed plenty adeptness and agility in Linux. Still, for someone like me, I find that there's plenty of things that require a bit too much work to make the process simple and easy, even if the list of those things are shrinking almost daily. The biggest example would be Media. I have a healthy media collection, and I still can't get Linux to smoothly operate as a media server the way that I'd like, finding it difficult to even get certain files to play correctly under Linux, if at all. While I understand the reasons, proprietary drivers, and non-free licenses, it's still frustrating. Given that there's several Windows options that are simple, almost one click solutions to this, and even after hour upon hour of research and searching for similar results in Linux and still coming up empty, the full switch to Linux is all the more difficult.

However, I have to admit something that thrilled me to no end today. I've been putting off the idea of setting up email and calender functions in Linux, since they're all web based anyway. This hasn't been an issue for me, but tonight, for some reason, I decided to see if there was any way I could set up mail and also sync my phone.

Ubuntu includes Evolution for email and PIM. I've used Outlook under Windows for years, so of course there's always an urge to look for similarities and differences. I was impressed on opening Evolution that it was a clean and simple interface. I have to admit that some of the options under the account set-up wizard might be a bit ubiquitous to many casual users who just want to get their Gmail or Hotmail being that there's just a lot of options on the screen with little direction as to what they mean, but it was pretty straight forward for me to get it up and running, and I found the IMAP support to be solid, setting up the folders automatically and then collecting and populating just fine. What really impressed me about the IMAP is that Evolution's IMAP speed is about 100 times faster than Outlook's. (Although, I've often wondered why Outlook's IMAP is so very slow to begin with).

Since I had my mail up and running, it was time to set up the phone. This was quite a bit more tricky. First, I checked the package manager, searching for terms like 'Windows Mobile' and 'Smart Phone', but the results were meager. So, it was off to Google, which didn't yield much at first either. (The top result for my first 3 searches were in German, if that means anything.) On my fifth try, I found something that looked promising. It was an article talking about SynCE, which turned out to be the ticket.

Now, setting up SyncCE to work took a bit of work in the terminal, and while the directions were fairly straight forward for me, there were a few things I think might catch people off guard if they're not used to working in a Linux environment (for example, there's plenty of direction on the exact command for 'apt-get' retrieval of the needed packages, but there are a few points where it mentions 'adding a line to /etc/something/file' without explaining exactly what that means. Sure, you can just 'sudo gedit' the file, but I fear there are plenty of plenty of people that just don't realize it's a file to edit in the first place)

After running through a few pages of commands, which involved setting up SynCE, then I needed to install and configure OpenSync.

For anyone reading this who doesn't understand what the difference is here. SynCE is the software that interfaces your Windows Mobile device to the computer while OpenSync is the software that does the actual synchronization between your device and your client (i.e. Evolution).

The entire process was pretty straight forward, and within about 15 minutes I had a working connection. Now, I haven't done much research yet as to whether or not there's a simple tray applet, for now I've just set up a simple shell script that makes the magic happen, but the process is very smooth. Once I had the connection established, I was able to sync from my Phone to evolution about 10x faster than I can under windows, using the 1 click program developed by Microsoft, which should work much better than anything anyone in the Linux community could come up with, but alas, it does not. Also, I've only done a few tests, but it seems that SynCE is able to connect and transact with my phone everytime, and very quickly, something that cannot be said under Windows.


Overall, I'm impressed. It's just another reason I won't have to reboot to Windows, even if that does only take about a minute.