Slashdot Mirror
Open Source-Friendly Smartphones For the Small Office?
Thunderstruck writes "I work in a small office with just two computers. Both machines run long-term-service releases of Ubuntu, with Gnome, and Evolution for scheduling, contact management and electronic mail. We plan to stick with Linux long-term. For telephone service, we're using smartphones. In order to keep everything straight, we need phones that can synchronize easily with the calendars and contact data on each owner's desktop machine. We cannot use cloud based services for this function due to ethics rules, and for security reasons. Right now, we do all of this with older Palm phones, but these are a dying breed. What options are out there right now for phones that will sync with Evolution (or another good Linux PIM suite) which do not require data to go through the cloud first?"
Consider, though, the following.
Android, in its current state, can talk to an Exchange server. If you have an option that will do this (Evo server, maybe?), use it.
Blackberry and Windows Mobile are both syncable on Linux in general. Do searches in the Ubuntu package manager.
Nokia Symbian, I believe, will function similarly.
This sig no verb.
http://syncevolution.org/ Looks fairly promising using your current setup. A brief look give the assumption it's compatible with evolution, and will connect up to anything that talks syncml, and there's a syncml client for nearly any smartphone out there. And some dated info found at http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=398113 gives info on someone setting up evolution to talk activesync, which would allow for windows-based phones to sync up...
As much as I like Android the most open source friendly current smartphone I know of is the Nokia N900. I would poke around some of the N900 focused forums, they may already be capable of what you're looking for and if not someone may have figured out how to add it already.
I recommend using Zimbra. It's free, is an excellent mail server similar in functionality to Exchange, and will easily install on either Debian 5.0 or any version of Ubuntu. You can use any mail client, and they even have their own client, as well as a feature-rich ajax-based web client. I sync it to my Android phone via MAPI, and it works very seamlessly.
Most of the mobile world I know of is slowly moving away from direct synchronisation with the desktop. Instead, the desktop and the mobile device sync with the mail/groupware server.
I suggest taking a look at Zimbra as it supports most devices out there. You can go at it both ways too, with either a server sync or a desktop sync.
We are using Exchange right now with the Evolution MAPI conduit. We are moving away from this solution in favor of Zimbra which will work across desktop and mobile platforms.
If you have employee information in your phone contacts, you are bound (in the UK) by the Data Protection Act to protect that data. If it's being sent to some cloudy server that might be hosted in a foreign country, then you are breaking the law.
Not to mention that the N900 has a PalmOS Garnet emulator available, so you might still be able to run some of your other legacy palm apps:
http://www.access-company.com/products/gvm/index.html
I myself recently made the move from a Palm TX to an Android phone (purely because I'm a Google Maps Mobile addict), but still find myself carrying the Palm TX around for a lot of legacy apps that I haven't been able to find "modern" equivalents for...
Anyway, I too am quite interested in where all the hardcore Palm users have migrated to (evidently it wasn't WebOS, if only for the lack of SD storage :P )
I use SyncEvolution with my Nokia E71. Works flawlessly. Will also work with the Nokia N900 and I'm guessing any Symbian S60 phone. http://syncevolution.org/
While it's true that Nokia isn't providing much support for the N900, it shouldn't require much "hacking" to get a working sync solution because it's already been done. The Maemo community has really impressed me with their ability to provide functionality well beyond what's available on a stock N900.
Knowledge Brings Fear
It's likely a firewalling issue. I used to work at a web hosting company that mostly used Courier on shared/dedicated/and vps machines, although a few (like my personal vps) ran Dovecot. It was necessary to tweak the firewall rules on a few of the shared machines to get BlackBerry phones to work with their push-pop mail. Not having an Android phone, I don't know if they support push pop from a secondary location like BB does, or not. However, I don't think that the issue is Courier itself, assuming all your authdaemon settings are correct.
I don't mean to be rude, but this was in fact, Nokia's strategy. The N900 can sync with evolution because all the good software for it is open-source.
In the new release of the firmware, even the stock N900 comes with the maemo.org production repository already activated - so, even the stock N900 has a whole bunch of working applications - open source.
The strategy with Meego is that even when the N900 is defunct the reason will be something better is there to fill its place, even if it isn't made by Nokia - they'd be mad not to continue with its niche success.
The n900 has syncevolution, that can supposedly sync with lots of stuff: http://syncevolution.org/documentation/compatibility
However, I'm not sure how reliable it is on the n900 at the moment.
I've been using syncevolution on the N900 for over six months now, and it's been working like charm, no problems whatsoever.