indiboi.com

When I bought my Palm Tungsten T a couple of years ago it was pretty much useless to even attempt to get it working in Linux. I was previously able to use my Palm Vx, which connected through a serial cabled dock, but I didn’t even bother trying with the USB of the Tungsten.

Since I’ve been making everything else work, I sort of created the little project titled above, the Tungsten was part of that. Well, it is working, mostly. There needs to be some more voodoo that I’m just not capable of, because while after a reboot I can sync it with Evolution just fine, a few times in a row… later on I can’t sync at all. Something is getting gummed up, either modules, or hotplug, or the sync daemon itself. I have udev creating the appropriate devices, but like I said, it only works one time, then won’t again until I reboot. I can’t really say it is working because I rarely actually reboot. This is the major problem with my pda, I never use it, because I never sync it. It syncs just fine with my iBook, even through bluetooth, but I rarely use the iBook to create appointments, contacts, etc; the sort of stuff I do in Evolution under Linux.

I’ll probably keep hacking at it, might get it, but then… who knows. I don’t know how syncing to Linux will effect syncing to the iBook, for all I know I just destroyed that, heh.

I also decided to give xcompmgr a try, it’s this little ‘thing’ that allows for true transparency and compositing in Xorg, the window server. It’s really quite nice, lots of little drop shadows and fading in and out. I don’t think I’ll actually use it on a regular basis because of three horrible and glaring problems:

1. You can’t log out of GNOME, it just hangs.
2. XOSD, used by Lineakd to make multimedia keys on the keyboard work, is garbled because the composite doesn’t update.
3. It seemed to break my focusing, wherein I couldn’t actually create a new folder on the desktop because the focus was glued to the currently open window of whatever was running instead.

Otherwise, I’d use it… but those are blocker-level problems for me. Another problem, while ugly, and related to the XOSD, was Mplayer… it uses non-square windows, thus the drop shadow is horrible, like a giant black square around all the curvy parts, yuck.