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I'm lazy in a lot of (most) ways. A lot of times I don't bother to set things up on my computers in a sensible fashion that ends up costing me time, but I never quite have the time to do the job right.
My phone, my Treo 650, is a very bad example of this. I've had the thing for a year, and I still haven't updated the firmware which I hope will fix a bunch of the problems I have with it. Ah, my naive optimism.
So finally, today, I'm getting my Ubuntu 6.10 laptop set up to sync to the Treo so that I can back things up, and install software, and so on. There are a few tricks involved.
The kernel that I currently have installed grabs the Treo out of the box. That's nice. When I plug usb sych cable into the laptop and hit the synch button, the Treo is mounted as /dev/ttyUSB0 and /dev/ttyUSB1.
I've always been a big fan of the JPilot software, which provides a syncing facility to some Palm-based PDAs. JPilot can connect to the Treo with no problem, you have to set the serial port to be /dev/ttyUSB1.
However, Palm devices apparently have a "username" and "user id", I suppose to prevent you from accidentally saving the information from one PDA onto another one. The Treo 650 apparently has a NULL username by default, which JPilot doesn't like. To install a non-NULL username and ID (the ID is just a random number), you must use the install-user command which is part of the pilot-link package. The command line goes like this:
craig@traal 16:13 ~ > install-user -p /dev/ttyUSB1 -u "craigtreo" -i 99521
Listening for incoming connection on /dev/ttyUSB1... connected!
Installed User Name: craigtreo Installed User ID: 99521
craig@traal 16:14 ~ > install-user -p /dev/ttyUSB1 -l
Listening for incoming connection on /dev/ttyUSB1... connected!
Palm user: craigtreo UserID: 99521
The second command reads the username that's currently on the device.
Apparently the proper way to have more than one Palm device sync to the same user account on your machine is to have a different directory for each one to save the JPilot status files. By default it uses .jpilot in your home directory, but the environmeht variable JPILOT_HOME overrides that. So now my .jpilot directory has the files to sync to the Treo and .jpilot_old has the files to synch to my old PDA.
I went ahead and installed my favorite application, an RPN calculator on the Treo. Now I'll have a good calculator application to carry with me again.
Now to go figure out how to update the firmware on the Treo.