I get J-Pilot in Zenwalk … and it works

I’ve gotten quite fond of J-Pilot, the Linux application that syncs with Palm handhelds. I use my Palm all the time for writing, and getting the files into my Linux boxes is a big deal.

First I got pilot-link with Netpkg.

Then I found the J-Pilot package here. It even put an entry in the menus under “office.”

I used the great Slackware tool, Pkgtool, to install it.

P.S. Before using this Zenwalk package, I tried about three different Slackware packages, none of which worked.

P.P.S. Anybody who says Slackware doesn’t have package management … tell ’em it does.

P.P.P.S. I have J-Pilot, but I can’t get it to sync. (Related info: Easiest sync: Debian Etch; hard but doable: Ubuntu).

P.P.P.S. I find out here that I need to set the device as /dev/pilot1. Thanks Zenwalkers!

P.P.P.P.S. I’ve used both J-Pilot and GNOME-Pilot. If you spend a lot of time in the Evolution mail program, GNOME-Pilot is a good thing, and in GNOME it’s easier to manage your Palm. Plus you can sync at any time, even if Evolution is not open. J-Pilot, in general, is a quite a bit lighter than Evolution, and unless you’re using Evolution as your mail client, it might be too much for the task. But both work. I haven’t tried Kpilot since I’m not running KDE on anything right now.

Palm’s VersaMail pretty much only works with Windows. Even the Mac client doesn’t support it, so I’m not all that pissed that it doesn’t work in J-Pilot or GNOME-Pilot (to my knowledge anyway). Besides, my Palm Tungsten E doesn’t work with most mail systems anyway. For that you need a newer Palm. Great strategy … right? That’s probably why Palm is doing so gosh-darned well.

Palm shakes hands with Linux

I decided that I needed the Palm back in my life. I can maybe steal a minute or two hear and there to write, and if I use pen and paper, chances are whatever it is will never make it into print/online because things change and what I wrote is no longer up to the minute.

My Palm Tungsten E had gone totally dead. I had to restore everything with a sync, and by some kind of magic, my Palm infrared keyboard suddenly started working again.

So it was time to get the Palm and Linux talking to each other.

The usual suspects are J-Pilot, Kpilot and GNOME-Pilot, the latter of which works with the Evolution mail client.

I’d had bad experiences before in Ubuntu with J-Pilot — it’s hell just to get the Palm to sync with the Linux box.

This time it was different.

I began with GNOME-Pilot in Debian. I managed to add Palm to the GNOME panel and turn it on. Then all I did was hit sync on the Palm, and the transfer began. All my data flowed to the box, and much of it was accessible via Evolution. I really only need to access the Memos from the Palm, but it was a bonus to have Addresses and Calendar there, too. My Word-compatible files from Documents to Go are probably in there, too, but I’m in no hurry to find them just yet.

Now that my Palm and Evolution were talking, I figured it was time to give the mail client a try. Previously I had problems configuring Evolution, but not this time. I programmed my IMAP account and was reading mail in about three minutes. Turns out I like Evolution. I’ve already given up Sylpheed for Thunderbird and Seamonkey, and at this point I like Evolution. I can’t say whether it’s better or worse than Thunderbird at this point. It seems about the same, except that Evolution has the aforementioned Palm hookup.

However, I also tried J-Pilot in Xubuntu, and after some frustration, I did a little Googling and found out that I needed to open a terminal and type:

sudo modprobe visor

I already had /dev/ttyUSB1 as my device, and after the modprobe command, it started working. I can hit the J-pilot sync button, then the Palm’s sync button, and the data begins flowing.

J-Pilot has a nice interface, and it’s less complicated than Evolution, because it’s devoted to the Palm.

P.S. I tried awhile back to install the Windows version of Palm Desktop under WINE, and that didn’t work. Palm Desktop may be old, but it’s ultra-quick and efficient.

Back to the Palm and Linux. Now that I have the Palm working in Debian and Ubuntu/Xubuntu, I’m pretty happy, and I’ll probably be using my Debian-equipped 233 MHz Compaq laptop a bit less. There’s something about hitting a button on the Palm and being able to write within a half-second that totally works for me.

So even though I see some promise in the new iPod Touch, but I hope it makes the Palm people think that maybe everybody doesn’t want their PDA to have a phone in it. A new Palm is long overdue. And a native Palm client for Linux is equally overdue. But for now, J-Pilot and GNOME-Pilot are doing the job pretty well.

Solar power to the people

The Universal Solar Charger from Brando is a God-sent for the gadget lover.
The device is small enough to carry around but don’t let that fool you.
It also uses good ol’ fashioned electricity to charge a variety of gizmos such
as cell phones and mp3 players

Palm girds for battle by trying to sell one-quarter of itself, bringing Foleo developers onboard

From Linuxdevices.com:

Days after unveiling Foleo, Palm announced plans to sell off about a quarter of the company to Elevation Partners, an investment firm run by Fred Anderson, and associated with corporate housecleaning. As CFO, Anderson helped engineer Apple’s most recent turnaround.

In less interesting news, Astraware will bring Soduku and Solitaire to the Foleo, and MotionApps will offer its mDayscape personal information manager for the device.

If Palm can only get the price of the Foleo down from $400 to $300, then we’ll talk.

Long live the iPhone!

Apple Inc. announced Monday that its highly-anticipated iPhone (coming to a retailer near you on June 29) will have a longer-than-expected battery life (8 hours of talk time, 7 hours of video playback, 6 hours of Internet use, 24 hours of music playback and 10 days on stand-by mode), leaving the competition in the dust. Currently, devices such as Palm Inc.’s Treo and Research in Motion Ltd.’s BlackBerry Curve offer 4 hours of talk time.

Apple said in January that it expected the iPhone to offer 5 hours of “talk/video/browsing” and up to 16 hours of audio playback.

Apple’s announcement is good news for us long-distance commuters. Now we can weave our way through traffic all the way from L.A. to New York without having to recharge.

Palm and Linux — not ready for prime time

I’ve been trying to get my Palm Tungsten E to work with Xubuntu — trying being the operative word.

I can sync via GNOME-Pilot, and I see all my Palm files in a directory, but what do I do after that? I downloaded J-Pilot, and that is not working at all — the Palm syncs, but it has nothing to do with J-Pilot, and none of the handheld’s data is flowing into that program. And every time I reboot, the whole thing goes to hell again.

Somewhere along the way I had to download pilot-link — if I needed it that bad, it should be one of the dependencies for the other apps when they’re installed through Synaptic.

To get the syncing working in the first place, I followed the advice in the Ubuntu forums to do:

$ sudo modprobe visor

(visor? are they kidding?)

and to add a line to fstab:

sudo mousepad /etc/fstab

(substitute YOUR text editor for mousepad, then add the following:)

/proc/bus/usb/ /proc/bus/usb/ usbfs none 0 0

The Web sites for all of these applications are out of date and extremely poor. Yeah, I know it’s free software, but it’s pretty much useless. If you have to totally geek it to get things working, there should be detailed, comprehensive information somewhere. It’s nice to have 18,000 Ubuntu packages, but how many of those apps have real value? That’s another question.

On a somewhat related note, I got a nice comment from a guy who works on HPLIP — the HP printing utility for Linux. I’m still impressed that the program works so well — and that a big hardware company is investing time and money to make things work better in Linux. Hell, Palm isn’t investing in its own brand and on the platforms it already “supports,” so why should they invest in Linux?

Getting the Palm Desktop — an ancient program on both platforms — running in Windows and Mac is blissfully easy. Getting things working in Linux are just way, way too hard. I’m not saying I won’t figure it out but it’s frustrating. It doesn’t need to be this difficult.

But getting back to Palm and Linux. I tried KPilot in Ubuntu. I did get a sync, but what do I do with it? I was told that it would only dump data into KOffice programs I don’t have installed. Then it wouldn’t sync … what did I do wrong? Guess I broke it.

I tried to install the real Palm Desktop software under Wine. Miserable failure.

My best hope is JPilot, which actually looks like it has the facility to handle the main components of the Palm world. I couldn’t get it working in Xubuntu … maybe in Ubuntu. Remember … if the Web pages for the programs are sparse and haven’t been updated in the past couple of years, chances are the project has been abandoned and the apps just might not work.

I know that the PDA is dying, that it only now exists as a value-added accessory to a cell phone. I also knowthat Palm’s commitment to the stand-alone, non-phone PDA product is extremely shaky. But Palms are cheap, and I’d love to see a simple-to-configure, bread-and-butter Palm Desktop application that works.

Technology for writers

Via a link from Low End Mac, I came across this great Wired roundup of tools for writers, electronic and not, which brings together some of the other gadgets I’ve meant to blog on, and introduced me to some new things I’ve got to check out.

I’ve already heard about the Alphasmart Neo, a $250 laptop-like device with a full-keyboard and smallish LCD screen. It’s aimed at a pure writing experience, and the best thing is that it weighs less than 2 pounds and runs 700 hours on a set of three AA batteries. Yes, I didn’t say 7 hours, but 700. It’s already been blogged about by the O’Reilly people here and here.

The Wired people also discuss their favorite pens, laptops, and two writing programs that intrigue me enough to try them out:

RoughDraft for Windows and Scrivener for Mac OS X. The best news about these two programs is that RoughDraft is sold on a “donation” basis, and Scrivener, although needing OS X 10.4 to run, costs only $34.99 after a 30-day trial. I don’t have 10.4 on the iBook at home, and I don’t do much writing on it, either, but I will give RoughDraft a try and report back.

My smart quote obsession

Some are exasperated with smart quotes, others live and die by them. AbiWord at one point did smart quotes, but it didn’t work so well, and its developers took out the feature for the time being. Microsoft Word, of course, is king of the smart quotes, and most full-features word processors offer the feature. Open Office does.

My obsession, for a couple of weeks, anyway, was figuring out how to enter smart quotes, em dashes and the like, in the Palm handheld. I figured it out.

But is it really that important? And why am I so concerned.

It’s because I had an editor for a time of a smallish, home-produced magazine who never got them right unless I did. If I e-mailed in straight text in the body of the e-mail, I’d get all straight quotes, and I think it looks terrible. So I then sent in Word files only, with the smart quotes and spacing set just so. He’d still screw it up (such is the lament of a copy editor when it comes to his own writing being edited).

But as some correctly point out, any halfway decent publishing software (everything from Quark to InDesign) will apply smart quotes to any text file, and do a better job, probably, than Word alone.

It’s certainly true for the Daily News’ Unisys publishing system. It gets most of them right. Possible exceptions are when single-quotes follow doubles. Some are the wrong direction. Same for years, like ’83. Those are usually backward. But the bottom line is that for the work I’m doing now (especially on the Web), smart quotes don’t matter so much, and the effort to generate them is wasted.

So I’ve got to let go. I’ve got to know that I CAN make smart quotes if I need to, but it’s not the end of the world if I don’t.

What are/were you obsessed by that you decided to let go. And I mean this in the geekiest sense, by the way.

Taking the Palm and Windows Moble pulse of America’s electronics retailers

I went on a mission. Call it CES – Woodland Hills. I wanted to see all there was to see in pocket-size computing. I wanted to try the latest Palm models as well as compare them with Windows Mobile devices.

Would the Microsoft-powered portables work as quickly and intuitively as the Palm? Would Windows Mobile’s version of Word solve my “smart” quote and em dash problems?

And what about the latest from Palm? The E2, T/X and Lifedrive beckoned. I’ve only been using Ilene’s Tungsten E hardcore for about three weeks, so it’s my infancy/honeymoon with the whole Palm concept. The fact that I’m composing entire blog posts in Palm’s Graffiti 2 script language with the E’s metal stylus means I’ve either gone crazy or discovered the missing link in my own writing workflow.

How hard could it be to see all that is new in Palms, iPAQs and the like?And since Woodland Hills is a hotbed of electronics retail, I assumed my task would be an easy one.

Little did I know that the state of PDA retail would range from borderline adequate (Frys) through wholly deplorable (Best Buy) to suspiciously absent (Circuit City). Some of this could be due to the general withering of the PDA category, but much of it must be due to basic neglect by the manufacturers of their products’ position and very presence in the retail arena.

HP, maker of the iPaq, could be focusing on desktop and laptop PCs, while Palm is moving toward becoming a cell-phone-only player.

Or it could be sheer incompetence and business-category suicide.

On my first trip to Frys, neither Windows Mobile-equipped iPaq was in working condition. All the Palms worked. That’s when I discovered the LifeDrive’s lag due to its reliance on a disk drive as opposed to memory to load applications. None of the Palms had a working Wi-Fi connection, something I very much wanted to test.

The cheapest Palm, the Zire, at $99, was dismaying after my weeks with the Tungsten E. No e-mail, a low-res, smallish screen, no Documents to Go — what exactly was the Zire good for? The extra $100 for the Tungsten E2 is mandatory. The next $100 for the TX is strongly suggested. But the final extra $100 for the LifeDrive is ill-advised. The TX is the sweetest of spots in the Palm PDA line, though the E2 will do very well.

Briefly, because even I’m tiring of this entry, here’s the rest of my search.

Circuit City: No PDAs at all.

CompUSA: The TX, Zire and E2 are all running. No PC-based PDAs are available for demo.

Staples: TX is running. Others not. No PC-based PDAs running.

Best Buy: Two Palms (TX and maybe LifeDrive) are behind plastic, barely seen. Not avaliable for demo. Prices ABOVE retail. No PC-based PDAs Smartphones have plastic “fake” screen and can’t be demoed.

Second visit to Fry’s: Two IPaq’s are now running. Is there any provision for stylus-based writing? If not, there’s not even a keyboard. What gives?

In the famous “smart quote” search, it appears the Word-like app on Windows Mobile devices does not do smart quotes. Since you can get them in any Palm application if you put them in a Shortcut (or use the Targus wireless keyboard), Palm wins the smart-quotes battle, hands (or Palms) down.

Fleeting obsession or natural progression?

There are two ways to look at my technological laundry list over the past many months. Old PC rehab, old Mac rehab (everything from new OS to wireless), through the Palm (the search not for Spock but for smart quotes, the importance of which is … not so much, now that I’ve found them) and now Linux.

If Palm Desktop ran on Linux, this “progression” would be that much more natural. Ah, if things were only that easy.

Update: There are ways for Palm and Linux to talk to each other. Evolution on Ubuntu Linux seems to be able to do it, and this page has a bunch of other apps that claim to do it, too.