Buy a PDA or handheld device, any PDA. It will come with a CD-ROM
designed for Windows. All the desktop software, drivers, and other
applications are designed to install on and run on Windows. Even files
that are meant to get transferred to the PDA will come in a format that
requires you to first place the files on a Windows system. The simplest
driver seems to come with a Windows installation wizard, but you can't
just use it to access the file you need. Instead, you need to run the
setup program, and you can only run the setup program on a Windows
system. While the vendors may feel that this situation makes for a
better user experience, it leaves users of desktop Linux or Mac OS X
systems out in the cold.
In this situation, Palm OS devices appear to be the most Linux-friendly.
While Palm OS devices such as the palmOne Zire or Tungsten families also suffer from Windows-only desktop
software, Linux supports Palm OS better than other PDAs. If you're
willing to perform a little extra setup work, you can make Palm OS
devices work with a Linux desktop system.
That's because out of the box, most Linux distributions include a number
of applications that can synchronize with Palm OS devices. For example,
Evolution, the GNOME desktop e-mail and personal information manager
(PIM) client, supports synchronization with Palm OS devices. Evolution acts a lot like a Linux version of
Microsoft's Outlook. With very little setup, you can configure the GNOME
desktop to communicate with your Palm OS device. You need to tell the
GNOME desktop your username on the device, and how you connect to it,
such as via a serial port for older Palms or over a USB connection for
newer devices. While you can configure more detailed settings, that's
about it for the default case.
The KDE desktop provides similar support. Once configured,
you can use the KDE PIM applications that will synchronize with your
Palm OS device.
In addition, if you like the normal Palm desktop software, there are a
number of alternatives that run on Linux. The Palm desktop software is
an all-in-one application for managing your schedule, contacts, to-do
list, and other data stored on the device. I happen to like this better
than Outlook, as it collects the PIM data into one unified screen. The
Palm desktop software also avoids a number of security issues that
afflict Outlook. On Linux, K-Pilot
provides a KDE desktop replacement for the normal Windows-only Palm
desktop application.
JPilot is probably the most popular Palm desktop
replacement. It includes a set of windows that mimic the Windows-based
Palm desktop application.
Most of these applications are built on top of the low-level pilot-link
suite, which manages low-level connections to Palm
OS devices. Another alternative to pilot-link is JSyncManager, which allows developers to write conduits in
Java. A conduit allows another application to synchronize its data. The
Palm desktop only includes conduits for the software built in on the
device. If you use third-party applications on your Palm OS device, you
need conduits for those applications in order to backup and synchronize
your data.
Ironically, Palm OS devices work better with Linux desktops than the
available Linux PDAs such as the Yopy and Zaurus. Furthermore, the Linux situation for Palm OS devices
remains better than that of the Macintosh, where you have to purchase a
third-party application, the Missing Sync, to
synchronize with Palms.
