The last couple of years I have had a variety of Windows Mobile devices. They were always working for me, but not exactly 100% as I would have liked. With regards to the communication with Linux, I have tried [...]]]> A couple of weeks ago, I had the possibility of extending my current phone contract again.

The last couple of years I have had a variety of Windows Mobile devices. They were always working for me, but not exactly 100% as I would have liked. With regards to the communication with Linux, I have tried with the SynCE group to work on this.

One thing I never did was writing programs for the device itself, only for communicating with the device under Linux. I did not think that writing programs for windows mobile under linux was very easy, so I never went further with this.

Also, lately I have been getting fed up with the fact that for new websites/services there are excellent clients for iPhone / Blackberry / Android, but almost never for windows mobile. A good example of this is Facebook, which has a very crappy Windows Mobile client.

After seeing which devices were available, I decided to extend my contract and get the new Desire HD. It took me a bit of time to get used to the new kind of interface, but I have to say that I really like Android (with Sense). I am really happy that my current phone does not have Windows mobile anymore The major advantage for me is that finally I have the possibility to add two exchange server accounts to the device at the same time, both with Push syncing: I can have my phone connected to the exchange server at work and at the same time to my Zarafa server at home

Also, having android allows me to easily develop applications for the device under Linux. The only thing left for me now is to find a good idea for which no app has been written yet

Having this new phone will mean I will probably not actively develop new functionality for SynCE-KPM anymore. However, if bugs are found, I will try to see if I can solve them

** (process:6884): WARNING **: synce_info_from_hal: Failed to obtain property pda.pocketpc.iface_address for device /org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/net_80_00_60_0f_e8_00: org.freedesktop.Hal.NoSuchProperty: No property pda.pocketpc.iface_address on device with id /org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/net_80_00_60_0f_e8_00 process 6884: arguments to dbus_move_error() were [...]]]> For the last couple of days an increasing number of people were mentioning that they had problems with synce in Ubuntu. After running synce-pls they received the following error:

** (process:6884): WARNING **: synce_info_from_hal: Failed to obtain property pda.pocketpc.iface_address for device /org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/net_80_00_60_0f_e8_00: org.freedesktop.Hal.NoSuchProperty: No property pda.pocketpc.iface_address on device with id /org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/net_80_00_60_0f_e8_00
process 6884: arguments to dbus_move_error() were incorrect, assertion “(dest) == NULL || !dbus_error_is_set ((dest))” failed in file dbus-errors.c line 278.
This is normally a bug in some application using the D-Bus library.

** (process:6884): CRITICAL **: synce_info_from_hal: Failed to obtain property pda.pocketpc.platform for device /org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/net_80_00_60_0f_e8_00: org.freedesktop.Hal.NoSuchProperty: No property pda.pocketpc.iface_address on device with id /org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/net_80_00_60_0f_e8_00
** Message: Odccm is not running, ignoring
synce-pls: Could not find configuration at path ‘(Default)’

It turned out to be a small error in the libraries that somehow made it into the launchpad repository. Sometimes Murphy just happens to pay a visit

The problem should be fixed soon, when new packages are uploaded to the repository.

So if you are running Ubuntu and seeing the exact error above, please be patient for some days and try often to see whether there are updates