Synchronizing PalmOS devices with Linux

Speaking as a guy who is all about the easy way of doing things, I think that a part of this article is over complicating the issue. While I smile at the mention of Jpilot; cause it just works. I must say there is an easier way to do the modprobing bit. All I had to do on three different distros was use Kpilot for Palm detection (and path to the device info), then enter that into Jpilot. Just my thinking.

Smart handheld devices or personal digital assistants (PDA) extend our access to the information on our desktops, from addresses to telephone numbers. Unfortunately, when it comes to vendor support for synchronizing this information with a *nix operating system, the options are limited. In this article, we’ll review the various GPL-based suites available for synchronizing PalmOS-based devices with Linux.

Various open source projects offer handheld synchronization. GNOME Pilot aims at GNOME users, KPilot fits the KDE crowd, and ColdSync is for non-GUI enthusiasts. Among the earliest such software are J-Pilot and PilotManager.

Your first step in trying to use any of the aforementioned packages is to assure that your desktop system can detect the PDA hardware. You may need to load a few a kernel modules or even recompile your kernel to make it work, but chances are that won’t be necessary; virtually all modern distros come with a preconfigured kernel capable of detecting most USB hardware and PalmOS devices.

To start, execute the following queries from the command line: dmesg | egrep usb and lspci -v. The output should tell you about the hardware your system recognizes. If you see any errors or warnings, then you need to follow the typical drill for hardware detection on Linux, which is to search for the appropriate drivers and modify your kernel either through recompilation or through module loading.