PalmPilot Software and Linux

These are the steps I used to get the PalmPilot Software running under Linux.

  1. Purchased a male-male gender changer. The Pilot's HotSync cradle has a 9-pin serial cable with a female connector. My A/B Switch Box also had a female connector.
  2. Downloaded the pilot-link software and the gzipped HOWTO. Read completely through the HOWTO, then scanned it as I started to build the pilot-link software.
  3. Ran the configure script using the following command line:
    configure --prefix=/usr/local/pilot\
       --mandir=/usr/local/man\
       --with-java=/usr/lib/java
    

    I used the --with-java option to get configure to run cleanly, but it doesn't appear to cause the Java bindings to be built automatically. Without this option there was an error from the configure script when it tried to find the standard Java libraries. I didn't try building the Java tools in the pilot-link package.

  4. Edited the Makefile to remove the reference to -lieee (there is no libieee on Linux systems) in the TCLTK_LIBS variable. This doesn't break anything, as far as I can tell, and allows the build to complete without any further problems.
  5. Ran make using my own user ID.
  6. Ran make install as the root user since I wanted the software installed under /usr/local.
  7. Added /usr/local/pilot/bin to my PATH variable: For ksh or bash:
    PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/pilot/bin
    export PATH
    
  8. Verified my second serial port (/dev/cua1) had read/write permissions for all users.
  9. Verified the connection was working with the command:
    pilot-xfer /dev/cua1 -l
    
  10. Started uploading programs.