Recently, when I've got the phone from my wife, I wanted to connect it to Linux box for synchronization, but it was not an easy task. Well, I did it and the connection I have right now is even better then Windows ActiveSync. So, if you have a Windos Mobile phone or Pocket PC and have Linux box, you can connect them.
I decided to make a little tutorial on this topic. There are already some tutorials on the web, so, this will be one of them.

First of course upgrade your Ubuntu and check if there are any changes in new version concerning Windows Mobile devices synchronizations. Just in case you dont even need my tutorial. If there are no described changes start here:

Step one:
remove module ipaq:

rmmod ipaq

Step two:
Get into /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist 

sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

and add the line at the end:
blacklist ipaq

Step three:
We are going to use packages called Synce and Opensync, so add their repositories:
open sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list and add following lines for Ubuntu Intrepid (in my case)

# SYNCE
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/synce/ubuntu intrepid main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/synce/ubuntu intrepid main

# Opensync
deb http://opensync.gforge.punktart.de/repo/opensync-0.21/ sid main
deb-src http://opensync.gforge.punktart.de/repo/opensync-0.21/ sid main

Save the file and download and install signatures for repositories:
gpg --keyserver hkp://subkeys.pgp.net/ --recv-keys CB210090B029CB84
gpg --export CB210090B029CB84 | sudo apt-key add -

Update repositories:

sudo aptitude update

Step four:
Now you need to install several packages:

sudo aptitude install multisync-tools multisync0.90 opensync-module-python opensync-plugin-evolution opensync-plugin-google-calendar opensync-plugin-synce python-opensync synce-gnomevfs synce-gvfs synce-hal synce-sync-engine synce-trayicon

Once you do that, I suggest you reboot, but in my case it started to work without rebooting, however, I still did reboot, just in case...

Once restarted you should see tray icon representing PDA but if you dont, you can start it manually: Alt-F2: synce-trayicon

Now, when you plug your PDA via USB, the PDA icon in tray should lighten up and you can use context menu on that icon.

This article was aiming to explain how to simply connect Windows Mobile device and Ubuntu 8.10 box. There are some more settings required to actually syncronize device with PC but I will cover those later in the other article.