Re: syncing my life (orgmode :)) to a mobile (android) device..cant find a holistic reliable way..how do you guys manage to do it?

[Detlef Steuer <detlef.steuer@gmx.de>]

Am Sat, 5 Dec 2015 14:08:19 +0000
schrieb Eric S Fraga <e.fraga@ucl.ac.uk>:

> On Saturday,  5 Dec 2015 at 09:10, Xebar Saram wrote:
> 
> [...]
> 
> > all this is great yet i travel alot to conferences and meeting and
> > do rely on a mobile device (in my case a android nexus 6) in many
> > situations. I check my emails on it as much as i do on my PC, look
> > at upcoming and schedule appointments, look at timed TODOS, add new
> > contacts i meet and collect info on the go (web links, food recipes
> > etc).
> >
> > Out of all the things i do only email (via offlineimap and mu4e)
> > seems to be able to Sync correctly.  
> 
> Yes, this is probably a valid summary of the current state of the art
> re: org and Android devices.
> 
> > So my question is (sorry for the long intro :)) what do orgmode
> > users (who also are heavy mobile users) do? do they give up on
> > contacts and calendaring on the mobile? maintain 2 separate
> > databases? what tools do people use to overcome this issue?
> >
> > I once had a nokia n900 which ran basically Debian linux, and thus
> > emacs could be run naively , these days it seems like all are
> > android devices. I still haven't found a gui friendly way to run
> > emacs there.  
> 
> I have two different working environments, depending on which mobile
> device I use:
> 
> Case 1: if I use an Android device (nexus 4 or 7), I rely on mobileorg
> heavily to synchronise my calendar.  I have mobileorg suck in any
> events I create in Google calendar and export all org events to
> Google.  This works quite well.  However, creating notes etc. on the
> mobile device in this case is not ideal as mobileorg is not a full
> implementation of org (and, to be fair, it wasn't intended to be).
> 
> Although there is an emacs distribution for Android, I've never really
> managed to get it working satisfactorily, with or without a bluetooth
> keyboard.  Android is a crippled Linux unfortunately... (in my
> opinion).
> 
> In the end, I primarily use my nexus devices as phones (really?) and
> for facebook (as one must).
> 
> Case 2: this is my preferred mobile solution.  I have an OpenPandora
> palmtop computer [1] running the full Debian testing distribution with
> Emacs and the org from git, not to mention gnus, LaTeX, Libreoffice,
> Octave, ...  The Pandora has WiFi and bluetooth but not 3/4G
> connectivity.  I use my phone to tether the Pandora to the 'net when I
> need to connect outside a WiFi zone.  In this case, the Pandora and my
> other systems are fully synchronised using unison.  Finally, the
> Pandora has 2 full SD slots which allow me to walk around with 128 GB
> of disk space.

Well, there is hope for Android users, too:

I bought an used ASUS TF 101 (but any such android tablet should do)
especially to try out various ways to install a real Linux on this
class of machines.

With linuxdeploy I was able to install a complete Linux (TeX, R, emacs,
git, rsync ...) on a *rooted* machine. Using a VNC viewer (bvnc in my
case) I get a complete graphical environment. emacs works nicely in the
terminal emulater session, too. Linux runs besides Android in a chroot
and I`m quite happy with this setup. 

On another *unrooted* machine (Galaxy Note something) I use gnuroot.
Only got it working without X11, but did not try too hard, because
solution 1 was working fine. According to the docs I´m just too stupid
to get a local X11-server working.

Both machines have physical keyboards attached, but in tablet mode
using HackersKeyboard emacs is usable, but obviously a keyboard is a
Good Thing(tm) for emacs users.

May be that helps someone
Detlef

> 
> I bought my Pandora specifically because I wanted a full org mobile
> experience!  I am awaiting the release of the Pyra, the upgrade of the
> Pandora, very eagerly indeed!
> 
> Oh, and the Pandora has a fantastic audio system :-)
> 
> Sorry if I have come across as an advert for the Pandora but I am
> obviously a satisfied customer.
> 
> HTH,
> eric
> 
> 
> Footnotes: 
> [1]  https://boards.openpandora.org/pandora/pandoramain.html/
>