PalmPilot - Tech - The Caboteria

Several years ago my boss and friend gave me a Palm III for a present.  I had a Psion series 5 already, so it sat in the box for a few years until the psion bit the dust (the infamous flex-cable failure that they all seem to get), at which point I moved most of my data (well, addresses anyway) over to the palm and started using it.  It's really not a bad device for browsing info that you've entered into the PC, but I still think that Grafitti _just sucks_ even after using it for almost a year.

In any case, I like (and use) the GNU/Linux operating system so I've been trying to figure out a good scheme for maintaining contact info on GNU/Linux and the palm.

   * pilot-link - low-level routines for syncing data between the computer and the pilot
   * coldsync http://www.coldsync.org/ - command-line applications for sync, backup, installation
   * <nop>PilotManager - a GUI wrapper for pilot-link
   * http://www.sun.com/software/xml/developers/palm/index.html - use XML on the server side.
   * http://www.pyrite.org/ - python tools to convert web pages and text docs into a format that's readable on the palm.
   * http://hopf.math.nwu.edu/syncal/ - syncal syncs iCalendar files with the pilot.

In the end it seemed that coldsync suited my style the best.  It's a simple command-line tool which does what you tell it to do.  I tried a few tools (jpilot, coldsync) and when I dropped my palm and lost all of the data only coldsync could restore it, so I guess it's pretty reliable as well.

Coldsync stores its configuration in =~/.coldsyncrc= and its data in =~/.palm= .

<pre>
 $ mkdir ~/.palm/backup-{date}
 $ coldsync -mb ~/.palm/backup-{date}
</pre>

-- Main.TobyCabot - 13 Jun 2002-25 Oct 2002 <br />