Ron's palm stuff

Ron and his Palm
Networking

I have been using several Palm PDA's for some years now. Currently I am using a Palm m515. A great little beast with colors, 16 megs of memory and a SD/MMC slot that usually contains a 32Mb SD card with some programs, books and a dictionary on it.

The Palm has a high geek factor I know. But for me it is the only way to keep track of all the things I am doing. Currently the following real import stuff is done with my palm:

Agendus for my meetings, addresses and todo's
Palm press for all my eabooks. This is great thousands of books for a very reasonable price (between $4 and $20)
MultiMail ProThis is a great mailer allthough it has not seen any updates in years. Palm bought it and are now promising a new product called versamail to arrive somewhere in November 2002
Space Trader. This is one addictive game of trading in space. and it is free
Silver. this is an alternative 'desktop' that is themeable

There are a lot more programs on the Palm. But these are used the most.

Network connections with the palm

The palm has a very good TCP/IP stack and there are a lot of good programs that can use it. As I am a linux user. I needed to find some stuff on the internet to connect to with the palm. Almost all the info I needed was to be found on the net. Only the last step was not there :( I needed to go to the source code of pilot-link to find that one out.

Setting up a ppp link

This was actually pretty easy. You need of course to have pppd installed. Refer to your distribution to get that done.
I ended up with the following little script:


      #!bin/sh

        /usr/sbin/pppd /dev/tts/0 115200 192.168.1.1:192.168.1.2
      silent local persist

      /usr/sbin/iptables -A FORWARD -s 192.168.1.0/24 -d 0/0 -j ACCEPT

The port I am connecting to (/dev/tts/0) is basically /dev/tty0 (or COM1 on a windoze system) but my linux system is running with devfs.

(not finished yet)

Network Hotsync

You need to have the process ip-csd running this is in the pilot-link package.
Depending on which version of pilot-link you are running you use the following command to sync or install:

pilot-link version 0.9.5
pilot-xfer -p . <command>
pilot-link version 0.10.99
pilot-xfer -p net: <command>

I have not yet tested with later versions.

Ron Smits

Last modified: Fri Jul 9 10:02:25 2004