[NBLUG/talk] HotSync difficulty

[Lincoln Peters]

First of all, I should mention that I ended up exchanging the Palm Z22 for a 
Palm TX this afternoon, as the Z22 quickly proved inadequate for what I 
wanted to do.

It seems that every new PDA on the market is set up by default to sync via a 
USB cable.  My old Palm m515 came with a USB cradle, but I later ordered a 
Serial cradle, since at the time it was practically impossible to use a USB 
cradle under Linux.  Well, I've been able to find two success stories about 
being able to sync a Palm TX with a Linux system, but one provided no details 
(no e-mail address, either!), and the other was from someone who wasn't sure 
how he got it to work.

I suppose I could hook up the Palm TX to a Windows computer with a modified 
USB cable and do a bit of packet sniffing to make a working sync driver, but 
I just don't have the time (and I don't know if I have the patience, either).  
So I'm thinking that it would probably be easier to use one of the 
alternative methods that the TX supports.  It supports:

Infrared:	This seems to work well enough for beaming events from my m515 (when 
it's working) to the TX, and claims to be supported by the TX for actual 
HotSync'ing, but I don't have an infrared port on my computer.  Based on the 
information I've found via Google, however, it sounds like it would be fairly 
simple to use a generic USB-to-IrDA adapter on Linux.

Bluetooth:	I have never used Bluetooth (although I considered it during my 
kitten-proofing experience), and considering how new a technology it is, I 
doubt it would work any better than USB, at least on non-Windows platforms.

Wi-Fi:	You would think that a Wi-Fi-enabled PDA would be able to sync over a 
Wi-Fi network, or at least it would be able to read iCal-style shared 
calendars (and thus do something vaguely resembling a HotSync).  But so far, 
I can't find a way to do this.  Maybe if I was to put my faith in some 
currently-unknown third-party aplpication for PalmOS...


As far as I can tell, the easiest and most reliable solution should be to use 
a USB-to-IrDA adapter on the computer and try to HotSync using infrared.  
Does this seem like a reasonable conclusion?  Anyone have experience with 
IrDA on Linux, and/or HotSync'ing a PDA via infrared, that would be relevant?


(By the way, the Palm TX uses an external AC adapter for charging, so I'm not 
worried that using a wireless method of sync'ing will make me forget to 
charge it regularly.)


-- 
Lincoln Peters
<sampln at sbcglobal.net>

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