10/11/2007

Holy palmer's kiss...

Sorry, pun right from the bottom of my niveau limbo.
My biological dis-organiser somewhere above my shoulders is getting increasingly buggy these days, so I invested into a Palm Tungsten E2.
I am quite impressed by the palm implementation in Linux/KDE, Kpilot worked without a glitch up to now (however, occasional problems even resulting in data loss have been reported elsewhere). Kontact is synchronised automatically.
What Kpilot can't do is install programs on the Palm's SD card. This is possible with the pilot-link library, to be precise, pilot-xfer. Although Kpilot seems to build on pilot-link, the library has to be installed separately to be used from command-line. However, pilot-link is available from the main SuSE-repository.

Do the following to install to SD (taken from the pilot-xfer man page):
Shut down Kpilot.
Press the HotSync button.
avocadohead@tisiphone:~/misc._soft/palm> pilot-xfer -p /dev/pilot -i teapot_en.prc -D /Palm/Launcher
Listening for incoming connection on /dev/pilot... connected!
Installing 'teapot_en.prc' ... (77738 bytes) 75 KiB total.
Thank you for using pilot-link.

I will certainly never let my tea brew too long again ;-).
According to its extremely useful man page (check out the other usage examples!), pilot-xfer is the "swiss-army-knife of the entire pilot-link suite". The -p option specifies the port (note: /dev/pilot exists only on HotSync), -i is of course the install option, and -D lets you choose the directory. I don't know much about Palm OS directory structure handling, but apparently the /Palm/Launcher folder on the card is recognised as a root dir.

N.B.: If this isn't working, try installing FileZ on your palm, install to main memory and shift your apps inside Palm OS. Or take an external card reader and transfer the file directly to the Palm/Launcher dir on your SD card.

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