Linux offers many alternatives to Windows based softwares. From internet browsers to word processors, almost every area of Windows computing seems to have a Linux counterpart (or maybe it’s the other way around). Anyway, some time last december, i set out looking for a software like Microsoft’s ActiveSync – which is used to connect and synchronize a Pocket PC with a Windows desktop – that could run in a pure Linux environment. Well i must have seen The SynCE Project, since it appears that there are no other projects attempting to develop this particular type of software. But for some reason, i never bookmarked it and forgot all about it.

As a result, i have still not been able to connect my Pocket PCs to a Linux machine directly, and rely instead on a Windows desktop as an intermediary. I guess i thought SynCE was relatively new at the time, but there’s another version out now, SynCE 0.9.1 – which is supposed to include “almost a year’s worth of improvements”. I wanted to try it out but i could only find RPMs for the older version (0.9.0), and i don’t feel like installing from source, so i might just wait a little bit longer. Either way, i’m not going to lose this site again.

SynCE (and related tools/plugins) offer the following capabilities:

• copy files
• list directory contents
• create directories
• move (rename) files
• remove files
• remove an empty directory
• run a program
• display status about remote device
• install a .cab file

Additionally, there are scripts and add-ons that can do stuff like:

• backup files from a Pocket PC to a Linux desktop
• convert PocketWord (.pwi/.psw) documents into OpenOffice (.sxw), html, and plain text
• synchronize PIM data between GNOME-based systems like Evolution and a Pocket PC
• synchronize KDE PIM data, integrating with Konqueror, drag and drop functionality and more