Now that I'm home, I can easily dish out more rants and raves about on
the road computing and why I think the Palm model will win over the
alternative (WindowsCE).
In a few words, the Palm was never intended to replace your desktop.
Hence, the spartan design and functionality provides a good balance of
useability at an affordable price. Of course, hardware and production
costs will go lower, but from the way I read our markets, the price of
entry level anything hardly goes lower than it already is now. If it does,
suppliers quickly discard the old stock of cheaper equipment and up the
bar with a new generation of new technology hardware at the same prices
the old stuff sold for when they were first introduced to the market.
Now, back to Linux lest I be found guilty of writing overly off-topic
posts to our beloved list.
The Palm devices are indeed supported by our operating system of choice by
more than a handful of programs, ready to provide integration with your
Linux setup when you want it. To date, I have not found the need to run
Bill's bloatware to get my Visor Deluxe to talk with my 'puter.
The Visor is a device much like the Palm, in fact, Handspring's founders
were responsible for the original Palm Pilots and progeny. The Visor also
uses a USB cradle to hotsync with the desktop, as opposed to the Palm
line, which hotsyncs via the serial port. More info on the Visor here
(http://www.handspring.com).
To get the Visor and my box talking, all I needed to do was enable USB
serial support and Visor support in the kernel. If you've got kernel
2.2.18 or 2.4.x, then most likely, you have this option available in your
kernel. If these options are not available, a quick visit to
http://usbvisor.sourceforge.net will get you the needed patch files. I had
prepared my box to talk to the Visor ahead and my kernel had been
reconfigured, recompiled and installed with the appropriate modules ready
when I finally got the Visor. Note that you will need to know whether or
not your motherboard uses UHCI or OHCI for USB.
After making the appropriate entries in /dev using mknod and ln, I was
ready to rock. I connected the Visor's cradle to my box's USB port and
continued to check that it would work.
Pilot-Link
The most mature tools for getting your Palm/Visor talking to your Linux
box would be Pilot-Link. Command line based with a rich plethora of
options, I've found this set of tools to be indispensible still.
Gnome Pilot
I am currently running Ximian Gnome on my Debian system, so all I needed
to do was "apt-get install gnome-pilot gnome-pilot-conduits" to install
Gnome Pilot and it was a breeze setting up. Some of the conduits are
broekn and are still being developed so I still had to resort to other
utilities. Still, gnome-pilot makes it quite easy to integrate your
Palm/Visor use with your desktop. The nice thing about gnome-pilot is that
you need not run a separate "Desktop" application to manage your
Palm/Visor. gnome-pilot provides you with the following conduits: backup
conduit (allows you to backup and restore your PDA completely or
incrementally, with a definable number of backups to retain), expense
conduit (not yet completely working, but it takes your ExpenseDB and dumps
it into CSV files that may or may not be understandable by GnuCash), file
conduit (allows you to install files onto your Palm), GnomeCalendar
conduit (synchronizes your Palm's calendar with your GnomeCalendar),
GnomeCard (synchronizes your AddressDB with GnomeCard), MAL (allows you to
use AvantGo, at the moment, it's Installing new files
onto your Palm/Visor is as easy as launching Gnome's File Manager (gmc)
and right-clicking on the files you want installed. If you've downloaded
the files in .zip or tar.gz, the file manager recognizes the compressed
archive files and you can just click on them to browse their contents. If
you're the command-line commando like I am, you can accomplish the same
task using "gpilot-install-file", with the option to put the file in an
install queue for later hotsyncing using the --later switch, or have
gnome-pilot prompt you to hotsync your PDA for immediate install. You have
the same options available when you right-click on the files using gmc.
malsync
AvantGo on your Palm/Visor, malsync on your box. I tried using the MAL
conduit in gnome-pilot but it kept crashing. I didn't want to go through
the trouble of getting the sources for the conduits and compiling because
I would have ended up getting more source code just to compile one tiny
bit of code that I had an alternative tool for. malsync is also useful for
those who don't use gnome-pilot (assuming the MAL conduit in it worked)
but still want to get their AvantGo fix without rebooting into that other
OS.
Plucker and sitescooper
Not satisfied with the selection of channels available on AvantGo? Fear
not. This set of tools provide you with the ability to process websites on
demand, or via cron and preprocess them for offline viewing on your
Palm/Visor after hotsync. Plucker, and sitescooper are a good combination
of tools to do just that. Check out their websites at
http://plucker.gnu-designs.com and http://www.sitescooper.org. The latter
program is useful for offline browsing too even if you don't have a Palm.
pilot-mailsync
This version of pilot-mail (included in pilot-link) has more options and
was more suitable for my present set up at home.
JPilot, Pilot-Manager
I have not used these extensively, but they function just like Palm's
Desktop from my brief peek at them. I prefer gnome-pilot's integration
into my desktop though.
All in all, these are the tools that I've used thus far in integrating the
use of my PDA with my box. I hope that this article has served to quell
fears of getting a PDA because it might not work with our beloved OS.
In a future post, my experiences in getting started developing apps for my
new toy as well as reviews of neat software.
-xen
--
eric pareja ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) ~-=[O]=-~ Here, have a clue. Get the picture.
PGP key at http://gra.ph/~xenos/xenos.pusa.pgp -|PLUG|- http://gra.ph
"Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced."
- Emperor Cleon in "Foundation's Fear" by Gregory Benford
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