Linux Palm Sync

I just bought a Palm T|X PDA. Pretty neat little toy. It has both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radios, and a nice color screen. So far, I have been able to connect it via bluetooth to my cell phone (Sony Ericsson S710a) VERY easily, and use the internet through the phone, which was neat.

As my primary OS is linux, I decided to see how well synching worked. I plugged the USB cable into the Palm and the PC, checked my dmesg output, and saw that the hotplug recognized it, and assigned it dev nodes. However, it assigned it both /dev/ttyUSB0 and /dev/ttyUSB1, which is something I’ve not seen before…. To get it working, I had to go to the gnome-pilot control panel, set it up to see my USB palm at /dev/ttyUSB1 with a speed of 115200 (you may also have to tinker with the timeout). I told it I had never synched before, and gnome-pilot created a sync profile with the palm. Next, all I had to do was select which DB’s I wanted to sync, fire up evo, and do a sync… it synched my contacts and tasks with little difficulty, much to my surprise.

Overall, this was a pretty easy process, but still not quite easy enough for a newbie to do.

Hopefully, whenever Mozilla comes out with the Lightning client, I hope I will be able to sync to that rather than Evo, as I quite dislike Evo.

I still haven’t figured out bluetooth synching, but I can send files back and forth from Linux.

The Linux Bandwagon

So, I’ve been noticing something recently. Some of my acquaintances that have been using Linux for ages are jumping off the bandwagon for unknown reasons. Somehow, they’ve become all depressed about the state of Linux on the Desktop, have been maligning it with increasing regularity. (see: I’ve Made A Grave Mistake)

Personally, I think they’re bailing out just as things are starting to get interesting. The introduction of the Ubuntu distribution is a pretty good example. Look where we were less than 2 years ago. Debian hadn’t had a stable release in years, X configuration absolutely sucked for n00bs, power management (suspend/hibernate) was utterly unreliable at best, and bootup times were slow, just to name a few. The polish work done by Canonical and volunteers has made Linux a pretty big hit, more people than ever before have heard of Linux, and it is being recommended to more and more parents/grandparents/etc… as a low cost alternative desktop OS. The lowered barrier to entry and strong community values have encouraged active participation in the project by users, which vastly helps with QA on the distro.

I was very disappointed today when I started hearing one of the guys who started me off with Debian in the first place is moving back to Windows, and possibly resigning his position with a popular open source project. I’m not going to call him out by name, but… THIS SUCKS MAN. You were one of the most adamant supporters of Linux I knew. Don’t be part of the problem by bitching and moaning… HELP OUT MORE.

Anyways, see you guys in hell. I’ll still be here in a year when you get bored/pissed off with Windows or OS X again. Just don’t look to me for sympathy.

Testing Flock

This is just a test to see how flock works as a blog poster.  Seems to be kinda nice so far, but WordPress’s web UI (AJAX based?) is pretty slick and hard to beat.

Flock is a branch of the Mozilla Firefox code with some social networking stuff built in (i.e. blog tools).

New Blog/Server dead

Just signed up for a WordPress account. I’m liking it quite a bit over maintaining my own MoveableType installation. The interface and API are great. Plus I’m sure I’ll find the Flickr integration useful in the near future.

My hard drive on my server just crashed, and I’m currently in the process of rebuilding the server. I probably lost all of my old data (including blog posts). I hope to have something running in the next few days and get my email up and running again at least. Thanks go out to Adam for hosting my email these last couple weeks.