Benjamin Clark

So, yeah, this is really cool stuff.
(Ignore the fact that I spent all afternoon on it.)

I “typed” (tapped?) the above text from within my HP Jornada 548 ‘s built-in version of Internet Explorer, but, quite honestly, it would’ve taken forever to say everything I wanted to, so I’m cheating and typing the rest. My Jornada, you see, now has a live connection to the Internet via PPP over a serial cable connected to COM1 (or /dev/ttyS0 as it is in Linux).

So, how did I do it… hrmm… Okay, for starters, I used a serial cable. I know a lot of people complain that they never got one with their 548, but, uh, I did. :) It was in the box right next to my USB cradle, which has been collecting dust over the last couple weeks since my migration to RedHat Linux. Anyway, I found a Mini-HOWTO on how to transfer a file to a WinCE device without using Windows or any sort of ActiveSync hack. Thankfully, the kind folks at Microsoft (ha!) included some sort of TCP/IP stack that allows me to make PPP connections with the device. I suppose the idea was for add on modems to interact with ISPs, but there’s no reason why I couldn’t use it over serial… right?

So, after the serial cable was connected, and the HOWTO was followed, I wanted to get access to the Internet. I had to read up on IP Forwarding (in the IP-Masquerade-HOWTO) and make sure it was on and set up correctly. Then, I plugged my DNS servers into the Jornada manually, gave it a static IP in my internal network (192.168.1.50), and viola I was on the ‘net.

[Ed.: Remaining content was not cached at the Wayback Machine.]