Shivakar Vulli

Mobile devices running Windows Mobile Operating Systems sync to Windows desktops using a proprietary software called ActiveSync. Obviously, this software is not available for Linux based operating systems and therefore Linux desktop users cannot sync their Windows Mobile devices with their desktops. However, there are software tools available to Linux users to achieve synchronization with their Windows Mobile devices. One such tool is SynCE.

About SynCE

SynCE is group of software tools which provide a means of communication and synchronization with a Windows Mobile device from a computer running Linux, *BSD or other unix-based systems using USB and Bluetooth. For more information about SynCE, visit the project homepage.

Although the information provided in this article can be modified to other linux-based operating systems and Windows Mobile devices quite easily, the following list of tool used is listed for reference and completeness.

Windows Mobile Device: Dell Axim X3i, Intel XScale 400MHz Processor with 64MB RAM.
Windows Mobile OS Version: Windows Mobile 2003 SE.
Desktop OS: Fedora 11 (64-bit), GNOME 2.26
SynCE Version: libsynce-0.14.1, synce-gnome-0.11-3

Installing SynCE

For other operating systems visit the installation instructions on SynCE website.

Install the necessary packages using

yum install libsynce synce-hal synce-gnome synce-sync-engine synce-trayicon synce-software-manager librapi

Any necessary dependecies should be automatically installed by yum.

Firewall Configuration for SynCE

Port 990 and Port 5679 are required to be unblocked for normal operation of SynCE. This can most easily accomplished by adding these two ports for tcp protocol in the Other Ports menu of System->Administration->Firewall configuration tool.

Using SynCE

After connecting the device to the computer, start the tray icon from Applications->System Tools->synce-trayicon.

Since Nautilus no longer uses gnomevfs (uses gvfs instead), Explore with Filemanager does not work at the time of writing. However, the command line tool pls works from the command line.

Add/Remove software can done from the Applications tab in the View device status window of the tray icon. Software manager can also be started from Applications->System Tools->synce-software-manager.

The Windows Mobile device is now ready to be used with a Linux desktop.

About Beagle

Beagle is a desktop-indepedent search service for Linux that lets you search your user files. It has the capability to search and index all files including images, music, videos, documents (pdf, odt, odp, etc.), emails, web history, IM conversations, addressbook, calendar, source code, archives and much more. It is a complete desktop search service perfect for anyone using Linux.

Beagle indexes user data in real time with indexing done at the time of file creation, re-indexing on modification and purged from index on deletion. E-mail is indexed up on arrival and IM conversations are indexed in real time. Beagle searches not only the text contained in the document, but also all metadata such as ID3 Tags for music, header information from emails, etc.

I use GNOME on a Fedora 11 machine, therefore I will detail the procedure to get beagle search up and running in the same. The procedure would be all that different with a different desktop or Linux distribution.

Installing Beagle

On Fedora you can install Beagle using

yum install beagle

Using Beagle

Once the installation is completed, start Places > Search and select Search > Preferences. Select the options you need but do check the option for Start search & indexing services automatically in the Searching tab. In the Indexing tab, add any paths that you want to be indexed, and any application data sources (like Thunderbird and Pidgin) that you want beagle to index in the Data sources tab. I have not used indexing remote search-enabled hosts feature, but you can check it out in Network options. You can also enable a web-interface and allow external access to local search services in the same tab.

To check the installation, open a terminal and issue the following command

beagled --fg --debug

This should display the settings of beagled. You can kill the service by pressing Ctrl-C.

When you login the next time, beagle will be running and indexing your existing files and should index any new file created. However, if you want to speed things up and index all the existing files before you start using your system again, beagle has a solution.

You need to export the following variable to set accelerated indexing. Keep in mind this is going to use as much as your CPU as needed and will take time some time depending on the number of files you have in your included search directories.

 export BEAGLE_EXCERCISE_THE_DOG=1

Now run the following command to start beagle in the accelerated indexing mode.

beagled --indexing-test-mode

This will set beagled to exit after indexing all the files in the current search directories. Once this is done you can logout and log back in to start using beagle for your searches.

At any time if you want to check the current status of beagled, issue the following command

beagled-status

And to shut down beagled you can either do it from Service Options in the search window or by issuing the beagle-shutdown from a terminal.

For more information on beagle, visit the project homepage.