On Tuesday 23 October 2001 03:55 pm, Edwin O.Erdman wrote:
Hi All!
Before I spend any more time beationg my head against the wall, I am going to ask: Has anyone gotten anything in Linux to work with the Pal Pilot Model Vx?
I have tried pilot-link, Jpilot (which I think uses pilot-link), and Kpilot (which I think has it's own demon.)
Yep! I use plain old pilot-link that ships standard with SuSE. I tried (and had working) the KDE Palm Pilot stuff, but found that it was more GUI than I wanted. pilot-link is actually very versatile, and because it is command line I am able to script and thereby automate the things I do on a repetitive basis. Two interesting tidbits: 1. The Palm model I have is exactly the same as yours, the Vx. 2. There is a hardware bug with the Palm cradle, in that the hotsync button on the cradle will try to use the IR port instead of the serial, regardless of the configuration in the Palm device's menus. This is a well-documented hardware problem with Palm devices and certain motherboard serial ports. No big deal -- from the Home menu on the Palm, select "Hot Sync" and you'll have a stylus-clickable button which *does* work correctly over the serial port. Here's a script that I use to back up my Palm regularly: ----- cut here ------- #!/bin/sh # Back up the Palm Pilot (full) to ~/palm, after renaming the previous # backup to ~/palm.old export PILOTRATE=115200 mkdir ~/palm ~/palm.old 2>/dev/null if ( ls ~/palm/*.pdb >/dev/null 2>/dev/null ); then echo "Updating backup in ~/palm" rm -rf ~/palm.old/* cp ~/palm/* ~/palm.old/ pilot-xfer -u ~/palm else echo "Making a full backup in ~/palm" pilot-xfer -b ~/palm fi ----- cut here ------- I have a symlink from /dev/ttyS0 to /dev/pilot, so that I don't need the PILOTPORT environment variable. (Just my preference...either way will work.) Be sure that the user under which you run pilot-xfer has read/write permissions on the serial port's device special file. The pilot-xfer utility can do lots of other useful things, such as installing .prc and .pdb files. (If you download Palm software and they tell you to use the Windows Palm desktop to do such an install, just ignore those instructions and use "pilot-xfer -i whatever.prc" or "..... whatever.pdb".) If you need further help, feel free to e-mail me off-list and I'll be glad to take a more detailed look. I'm travelling on business this week and am only skimming the SuSE lists, so if you only post there I'm likely to miss your message (sorry). Scott -- -----------------------+------------------------------------------------------ Scott Courtney | "I don't mind Microsoft making money. I mind them courtney@4th.com | having a bad operating system." -- Linus Torvalds http://www.4th.com/ | ("The Rebel Code," NY Times, 21 February 1999)