Monday, October 13, 2008

Buh-bye, Pocket PC

I'm kicking my Pocket PC to the curb. In its place I have a new Dell Inspiron 910, powered by the new Intel Atom chip. For sheer comfort I've ordered it with Windows XP, and then installed Mozilla Sunbird. I have the option to install BirdieSync if I wish to keep syncing this PC with the Pocket PC, but right now I'm content just to have the option. BirdieSync isn't available for Linux; that's the only reason why I didn't order the Inspiron 910 with Linux. (BirdieSync requires Microsoft's ActiveSync, and you can bet Microsoft won't be porting ActiveSync to Linux any time soon. I never liked ActiveSync anyway.)

Moving my Sunbird calendar data from another PC to the Inspiron 910 was a bit tricky. After hunting around I identified the file where Sunbird stores the calendar. It's got the non-intuitive name of storage.sdb. I copied it onto a jump drive and then replaced the new storage.sdb on the Inspiron 910 with the one from my PC. Viola, my calendar is there and it even knows the Calgoo URL where it should publish. All I have to do is enter my Calgoo name and password.

Next up: Installing a CalDAV server on that old Windows PC. Part of the next phase: Giving River a secure place to publish her calendar on our LAN.

1 comment:

Timon Braun said...

This may be a bit afield but I was once fiddling with storage.sdb and came up with a little hack for syncing my laptop to a home server. I used dyndns to get a persistent address to home, then used FUSE to mount a connection over SSH. Then I deleted the laptop's storage.sdb and replaced it with a symbolic link to the locally mounted remote storage.sdb. It worked fine, not really ideal but I think something like it, eventually and with some kind of version control and awareness of multiple mini dbs or xml files, could.