Mandriva 2008 Spring hotsync with Tapwave Zodiac & J-Pilot

I have been wanting to be able to sync my Tapwave Zodiac1 & 2 pda’s with several different linux distros for about 2 years now with no success. I have been using Mandriva One 2008 Spring with the KDE desktop for over a month now and I think that I have finally found my linux distro of choice. It just seems to work with about everything that I have had problems with in other distros, and a main one was getting my Zodiac pda’s to sync within linux. I had been syncing my Palm m125 with most distos that I have tried both with KDE and GNOME, but I never could get my Zod’s to work. But today was a great day! I took my Zodiac1 and installed J-Pilot 0.99.9 onto my Mandriva system and tried the old /dev/ttyUSB1 and it would not work. So I found this link in the Mandriva Wiki and I found where it said “The visor module is blacklisted, in /etc/modprobe.d/visor, so /dev/ttyUSB1 does not exist” I was getting an error saying that /dev/ttyUSB1 did not exist so I figured I was on the right track. The Wiki also went on to say to enter “usb:” and that would take care of it. I am not going to go into all the details about J-Pilot but if you are trying to get your Zodiac to sync with linux this works great. I am using Mandriva linux and there are a lot of issues that I have had problems with using other distos, but with Mandriva so far I have had nothing but good experiences with everything that I have done.

Spring Cleaning, fixing and comming back to life.

Well it’s finally spring and I have been getting outside more and enjoying the weather. I have a lot to do around my home because this past winter was a “HARD” winter, it was long and very very cold. And on top of the long cold winter I have had no running water for over 6 weeks. Yes my water froze up a couple times and then I would figure out the problem and get it unfroze and then it would happen again and well it happened about mid Feb and it just started to flow again 2 days ago. I found out it was unfroze because I heard water splashing around under my bathroom. I ran outside and sure enough the shutoff knob that brings water into the house was leaking. So I shut off the power to the well pump. I live in a mobile home that has an addition on each side of the “trailer” so most of my house is additions. I live by myself so I just had to deal with the ordeal myself, last year my wife and 2 step daughters lived with me and we had a water problem because the pump itself froze up, but I had it fixed in about a weeks time because I had to basicly rebuild my well pump at the cost of about $500 to $600 dollars and all was well once again, because it was hell for a while if you can imagine 3 woman without water for about a week or so. Anyway I now have the situation figured out and this summer I will rerun the water lines so they will be getting heat on them so this wont happen again. I don’t know if the people before me had this problem or if it was just a bad winter but if you can imagin 6 weeks without running water well that kind of gives you an idea of my last 6 weeks of winter. Every day was a camping trip for me yeha! Anyway I have a lot to do before the next winter comes so I don’t go through what I did this winter. I have lived in the rural northern Michigan for about 15 years now and I burn wood for heat with propane for backup. I like living like I do it’s kind of tech/hick, I have all my gadgets computers, game counsels, PDA’s, cell phones, cable TV/ISP and everything just like anyone else in the city has except I live in the coultry and by this summer I will have a small farm going. I have lived here for about 3 years and I have yet to get me a garden going and some chickens for eggs and well that’s about where I want to be this year. I also want to fence off my property so my dogs can run free I have about 1 acre. So I have a lot to do this summer to get my little farm up and running like I want it to, I will post some photos and video clips as the work progresses. Anyway I started this post because I am sitting at my computer and I really need to do some spring cleaning on it. I have WinXP and Ubuntu Linux on my box along with a 60 GB FAT partition that is shared by both for music and photos and such. But I want to clean up my hard drives and install Mepis 7.0 instead of Ubuntu. I love Mepis and have used it up until 6.5 when I tried to install it and for some reason I get an error message saying that the installation program cant find the mepis installation files on the CD. I just cant figure this out. The installation disk is recognized and goes into the installation then it just stops and says it cant find the needed files. So I am going to install Mepis 6.5 and maybe a few other distros to see which one I want as my default distro. I like trying different distros and they are changing so fast and getting better and better so fast it’s hard to keep up with them. So I am now Spring cleaning my Hard drives and will be partitioning my 60GB drive into oh maybe 3 different 20GB partitions so I can have 3 distros on it. Maybe Ubuntu, Mepis and oh Fedora or maybe Xubuntu, openSUSE or Mandriva oh hell I might even partition so I can have about 6 to 8 distros on it I don’t know we will see. In case anyone is wondering I use a boot manager called GAG that can boot up to 9 different OS’s. If you want to check it out it’s here: GAG. Well I need to get back to moving my files around and backing up my partitions to get ready for my Linux transformation, damn I hope I can get Mepis 7.0 to work it’s my favorite and I would just use it if all goes well. So if there are any Mepis users out there and you may be able to help me give me a hollar and help a “Mepis Lover” do some Spring Cleaning.

Mandriva and Ubuntu linux installation.

This Thanksgiving was a very mellow one, so I decided to do a fresh install of my current favorite Linux distro’s. I had Ubuntu 7.10 “Gutsy Gibbon” on a 60GB HD that is in my system, and in the past when I partitioned and then added another distro “after” I had Ubuntu on the system I always ran into problems. So I backed up my home directory to a NTFS partition that I have on a 150GB HD that is also in my system and it has WinXP on it along with another 60GB NTFS partition that I use to hold files that I use in both WinXP and Linux. I would put say my music on this partition so I don’t have to put the music on both OS’s and other files as backup copies etc. I first installed the new Mandriva ONE 2008 with KDE, I have always liked this distro because when I first started to get into linux I bought Mandrake 8.1 for $20 at Wallmart around “01 or “02″ and it was the first distro that I got going on my old HP pavillion. And since then I have downloaded and tested just about every distro that I could get my hands on and I also like Ubuntu with the GNOME desktop. Now I have Mandriva with KDE and Ubuntu with GNOME, each desktop has it’s pro’s and con’s and I cant quite decide on which one I want to use as my “main” desktop. So now I will have these 2 distros with the 2 main desktop environments to play with and tweak to my hearts content this winter. I run WinXP and Linux on the same box at the moment because I just cant get everything I need from just one OS be it Windows or Linux, so I like to have both as options. Well I know that I really did not write down anything that would help anyone figure out any tech issues, but that will come later. I want to start putting some tutorials on this blog, because I have gotten a lot of help from others blog’s in the past with a lot of different tech issues and I would like to add my own 2 cents and maybe help someone out when they are looking to find out how to partition a hard drive for a dual boot Windows/Linux box, or any number of things that I have learned along the way as I move into the Linux world and the Open source community and away from the proprietary world of Window$.