Solving connection problems
There are a variety of reasons why the connection between the device and your computer is not working. On this page you will find the most common ones, including solutions to get things working.
Password protected devices
If you have a password protected WM5 device, you must first provide the password on your computer before you can actually make connections to the device. You can use SynCE-KPM (KDE) or SynCE-trayicon (Gnome) for this.
With Windows Mobile 6 devices, you will be prompted to enter your password on the device itself whenever you connect the device to the computer.
As long as you did not type in the password in SynCE-KPM / SynCE-trayicon (WM5 devices) or on the device itself (WM6 devices), you will not be able to receive any information from the device.
ipaq kernel driver trying to setup connection
If you connec the device and synce-pls does not work and you know that the device is in RNDIS mode (see the main Ubuntu page), you can check the output of the command dmesg for lines containing ttyUSB. If that is the case, please disconnect the device and run
sudo rmmod ipaq
After that you can blacklist the ipaq driver, in order to prevent it from incorrectly claiming the RNDIS device by adding the line:
blacklist ipaq
to the file /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist
After you have done this, try to reconnect the device again.
Network manager trying to handle the connection
In case you are running network manager, it could see the new RNDIS device and try set it up. When networkmanager does this, it could interfere with the stuff SynCE needs to send to the device. In case you are running network manager and you have problems with connecting your device, you can disable network manager for the RNDIS device as follows.
Type the following command in a terminal:
/sbin/ifconfig -a | grep 80:00:60:0f:e8:00 | cut -d " " -f 1
then add the next line to /etc/network/interfaces:
iface <interface of your device> inet dhcp
where <interface of your device> is the output of the previous command.
This will make Gnome Network Manager ignore the interface. Then restart the networking with the command:
sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart
Firewall blocking the connection
Another thing to check out when you are having connection problems is your firewall configuration (if, of course, you are using a firewall). For instance, if you are using Ubuntu's default ufw you can check out whether it is running and what the rules are by issuing the following command:
sudo ufw status
If the firewall is running it might be blocking your connections. You might want to disable it completely by running
sudo ufw disable
and if it is, indeed, the source of your problems add a rule to allow connections from your PocketPC device:
sudo ufw allow from 169.254.2.0/24 to any
and it should do the trick.