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In the coming days, I plan to document this arcane process a bit more clearly (though admittedly it didn’t ultimately take all that much fidgeting around to get it working — it turns out that when you assume features labeled “advanced” won’t work because even the basics aren’t working, you are sometimes wrong ), but I made a series of really happy discoveries today regarding my HTC Excalibur (the “T-Mobile Dash” in the United States) and my laptop running Ubuntu 8.04:

• Synchronization now works (calendar, contacts, e-mail, and files) with Evolution on the laptop and the phone’s own native apps
• Network sharing works in both directions
  • If my laptop has a network connection and my phone is connected, the phone can happily share the laptop’s connection
  • If my laptop does not have a network connection and my phone is connected, if I enable the phone’s “Internet Sharing” app (just standard practice here — no special tricks), my laptop can snag an IP address from the phone via DHCP (again, all automatically) and share its connection
• Though it is an absolute pain in the ass (no recursion, and no wildcards), files can also be manually copied from anywhere on the device (storage card, root folder, etc.). Regular file synchronization in the device’s internal memory “My Documents” area works correctly.

Right now, synce-gnomevfs doesn’t seem to work (the damned binaries don’t seem to understand where to find each other):

will@prometheus:~$ synce-in-computer-folder install
Failed to open input file: '${prefix}/share/synce/synce-in-computer-folder.sh'.

(if I can get this piece fixed, it will mean the file browser (Nautilus) will let me skim around in the phone’s filesystem which will help sidestep the command-line “one file at a time” thing)

Update: It’s fixed. Ubuntu 8.04’s GNOME uses an entirely different system in Nautilus for plugging in new devices; building the experimental gvfs support for synce fixed this whole thing and now I can browse files on my phone via Nautilus. File operations work too. Woohoo!

But this has got to just piss off somebody in Redmond, Washington something fierce — a Windows-based phone is cheerfully talking to and working with a “lowly” Linux box. Nyah, nyah! This was the last thing I “needed” Windows for (though the phone is capable of installing apps on its own, which made that issue much less itchy).

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