Friday, 4th Week: Palm IR Hotsync on Linux

Not the most gripping of post titles, I admit, but for those who have been trying it's good news...

I finally got my Palm syncing with KPilot via my IrDA dongle. I'm fairly certain that the USB connection is iffy, though it's only HotSync that fails with USB, and other software works fine over the connection. Oh well, I've had it too long for it to still be under warranty. IrDA is slower, but it still works!

OK, so here's the setup: I have a SigmaTel USB IrDA dongle. This makes it a tad more involved than with a serial one. First, a few modprobes (as root, of course): irda-usb, ircomm, and ircomm-tty need to be loaded. Then an irattach irda0 -s connects everything up. Telling Kpilot to listen to /dev/ircomm0 then allows the Palm to sync!

It sounds so simple, and I've tried so many things so close to this before. I actually found out by trying to find some software that would let me download stored SMS messages from my phone, and trying that via ircomm0. It worked. I thought, "Hmm. That hasn't happened before" and the connection was made!

This week I also got a nice shiny new leather case for my Palm, as the original flip cover has split quite badly. It's lasted ages, to be fair! So now my PDA has a leather jacket. It opens the "wrong" way (with the PDA on the left and the flap on the right), though this does give somewhere to rest my hand while I use the stylus.

So I guess you could say it's been a pretty PDA-centred week. It wouldn't entirely be true - if anything, it's been illness-centred and hopefully Christ-centred, being mission week - but you could say it nonetheless...