I’ve spent a while this morning getting syncing and file browsing to work between my Axim x50v and Ubuntu, so I thought I’d write up what I did to get it going….

First of all I followed the guide in the first post at http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=30936. That didn’t quiite work, since I already had 2 connections configured on my PDA. Initially I got the error message:

[synce_info_from_file:51] unable to open file: /home/nathan/.synce/active_connection
[rapi_context_connect:97] Failed to get connection info
[main:62] Failed to initialize RAPI

when trying to create the connection. I had to delete my ~/.synce folder and use the synce-matchmaker replaceINDEX command instead of synce-matchmaker create INDEX.

This worked fine for syncing with Evolution, but I still couldn’t browse my file system. For that I had to get some more programs from http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=30550&package_id=92164 – synce-gnomevfs and synce-trayicon. These packages come in either source or rpm, so to install them on Ubuntu I had to use the alien command, for example:

sudo alien -i synce-gnomevfs-0.9.0-1.i386.rpm

When I tried running synce-trayicon, I got the following error message:

synce-trayicon: error while loading shared libraries: libgtop-2.0.so.2: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

So I installed libgtop2-dev and made a symbolic link between /usr/lib/libgtop-2.0.so.7.0.0 and /usr/lib/libgtop-2.0.so.2. Then synce-trayicon would run, and I could browse files on my PDA! Hurrah!

I haven’t sorted out hotplug yet, but apparently http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=399601&aid=1204938&group_id=30550 has some useful info on that.

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