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It was about time for me to get a new phone PDA, so a week ago, I upgraded my cell plan and got a new phone, a Palm Centro. Like my last phone, it's about at the end of its sales life. The Centro is smaller and lighter than the Treo 650, and so I think I'll like carrying it more.
The big thing was whether I could sync it with the Linux Jpilot tool. It was very easy; transferring things over from the old phone was harder.
To get the Centro to sync with JPilot, there are two things you need to know.
One is that one of the connection settings needs to be changed. Go to the hotsync application. "Options" menu, and go to the "Connection Setup" item. Select "Cradle/Cable" from the list, then hit the "Edit" button on the bottom of the screen. On the "Edit Connection" screen, push the "Details" button on the bottom. Set the "Flow Ctl" option to "on" (default is auto).
When you plug the sync cable of the Centro into the computer, a library will automagically connect to it. Unlike other PDAs, once the USB cable is plugged into the computer, it will connect.
The second thing you need to do is to set the location that the port to the phone will show up. Due to this automagic library (I got this info from this blog post) the Palm device won't show up as /dev/pilot. To use JPilot, you must tell it to connect to device "usb:" (without the quotation marks).
Once those two things have been done, open the JPilot application and hit "hotsync", then push the software sync button on the phone, and you're off to the races.
As far as moving the files from the old phone to the new, that was a bit tricky. Jpilot stores its state and data in the directory .jpilot. I created two separate directories, one called .jpilot_old and .jpilot_new to keep them separate. I wanted to be able to transfer all the informattion from the old one to the new one. That was tricky. I was able to get the calendar and memo information across by "exporting" them from the old and "importing" them into the new jpilot account. The contacts list wouldn't export properly, I would just get an empty list of lines. I used the Palm-OS IR "beaming" function to send the contacts across; that worked fine.
One of the reasons that I wanted the Centro was because I like applications that come from Palm OS. One of the principle ones is the RPN calculator program that I use. After getting all the basic information synced up from the last phone, I installed the RPN calculator and even dug up the unlock code to get it working. I now have a fully fledged phone again, how nice.
