negativeZero

Linux on iPaq h1910

I bought my iPaq h1910 3 years ago. One of my colleagues went for a trip to SFBay and asked if there was something I wanted to get bought there. And,  yes , there was. An iPaq 1910. I never had a palmtop or any such toy, so I decided for something cheap for starter with more than 4 colours on the screen. The h1910 was new by then, slim in metal jacket so it won the race.

It really was cheap and so it has no Bluetooth or WiFi. The only way to connect to it is via a USB cable. Over time I think I should have payed more and bought one of those with Wifi or Bluetooth which might have made me use it a bit more. See, it's really not much fun to boot or reboot you computer to Windows when you need to synch things.

The other thing that was not too pleasant was it's connectvity to anything other then Windows. With linux things were more complicated. First time connecting I found out the kernel USB driver did not recognize the USB id, so I had to go into kernel USB driver and add my device ID to the list of known devices to make it work. Then I was able to connect and transfer files from PC to ipaq, but that was not enought: I needed sychronization.

The other thing is that 'synchronization' means 'synchrnoziation with Outlook'. But in my equation the 'Outlook' part is missing, so there was no synchronization at all. Or almost. 

There is a project called synce . It is an excellent toolset  that does for a Unix guy what ActiveSync from MS does. Almost. My first attempt to synchrnoze with evolution ended up with removal of info on both sides, which -- no doubt -- is a synchronization in an extreme sense. It is not exactly that type of synchronization one would use on everyday basis unless you're that guy from Memento. The problem was in different version of evolution and mutlisync as I found out later. It was partially my fault and it was long long long time ago, newer versions worked much better and that was when there was no linux for my iPaq.

The other thing I gave a shot was sync4j .  Sync4j is a SyncML server with clients and of it's clients is written in VisualBasic for iPaq. Worked quite well, but in the meantime I got so used to synce that I stuck with it.

For the last year I have not been using my ipaq a lot. When I used it, I would mostly listen to mp3s when travelling, but I would not use it on a day to day basis. I listened a lot of times to the same songs over and over because uploading songs to the iPaq to it's SD card was a brain draining experience. Each time the upload reach 10-12MB it would freeze the iPaq. Uploading 200MB worth music required a lot  of patience and time, both things I'm running out of very fast.

So, I took a rather radical step to improve the synchronization. I installed linux.

There is this great project out there all about linux and handhelds. For long long time there was not much news on the h1910 front but thanks to guy who calls himself aquadran things are going fairly well. It is possible to fairly easily to install a linux distro with either opie or gpe . GPE is not fully supported, but opie is good enough for every day use. And the synchronization ? Ahhh... that's a like a dream.

Read on in next installment -- the installation and tweaking.

Posted at 02:37PM Jan 18, 2007 by bs31 in Personal  |  Comments[2]