Palm Syncronization with FreeBSD
I have had a Palm for a few years, now. It is designed to be used with Windows, but there is generally good support for Mac users. On supported platforms, nifty software is provided to syncronize the data in my Palm applications with the data in my PC applications. However, we Unix users are on our own. There have been a couple of solutions put out there, but how do I choose among them? I never found a comparison of the various stuff that exists.
- pilot-link: This has been around forever. It is really a collection of tools for manipulating the Palm and Palm databases. At the very least, it is good for backing up your Palm. It is also used when using gcc to build applications for the Palm.
- coldsync: This is intended to be a cleaner, well-designed replacement for pilot-link. It seems to do as advertized. There aren't, however, a lot of conduits available for it.
- gnomepilot: This has been described to me as a GUI front end for pilot-link.
- kpilot: This has been described to me as a GUI front end for pilot-link.
- jpilot ???
- kdepim ???
pilot-link
coldsync
I really like the design goals of coldsync. Unlike pilot-link, it is a cohesive architecture for communication and conduits intended to make configuration a simple task. It is controlled by a central program, which can be run as a daemon seperate from your GUI.jpilot
Well, I hadn't actually been planning to check out jpilot, but I saw references to it in the source code for Sylpheed, the mail program I have been trying to migrate to.
jpilot is a GTK application for viewing the datebook, addressbook, ToDo list, Memo pad, and Expenses on your Palm. It sits atop pilot-link, and can apparently manage backups, as well. I haven't played with it much. The user-interface looks a little odd, but it seems to work alright. I will probably keep using it.
Annoyingly, after I jumped through all the hoops to compile jpilot support into Sylpheed, it didn't do what I had hoped. Rather than syncronizing my email, all it really did was access the address book database downloaded from my Palm. That's a useful feature (and I will use it), but I really, really want to start getting my email on my Palm. Oh, and the name seems to be misleading. It doesn't seem to be specific to jpilot at all, except for the default location of the AddressDB.pdb file. It uses the pilot-link library to access the file.
Syncronizing Mail
The reason I've been going through all this is that I want to syncronize my Mail. For me, there is no value in accessing the other information on my desktop. And yet, I have not managed to get my email syncronized. This could probably be a topic all its own.
Part of the problem is that there are many different email configurations. Local mail spools (in mbox, maildir, and ...), POP3, IMAP4 ...