I was surprised when I found that the Gnome Pilot Applet didn’t work – it didn’t appear at all. In the past I just brushed it off: but then, I decided it was time to get it fixed.
Strangely enough, there is a bug report about this and it is fixed in Karmic Koala (the upcoming version of Ubuntu) but not in Jaunty. This could be fixed in Jaunty but it isn’t. Can’t say why – makes no sense to me. The fix is to use an updated version of gnome-pilot which includes a patch to fix the bug – but this updated package is only available for Karmic.
However, loading the updated version of the gnome-pilot package (using the i386 version) was simple and there were no problems. I then restarted the gnome-pilot daemons for good measure:
sudo pkill gpilot
Probably overkill – but it doesn’t hurt. Then add the Pilot Applet to the panel and you should see the icon – and your gpilotd daemon will start in the background.
Next, click on the applet itself – and wait. The gnome-pilot Settings window should appear shortly. Make sure that the ID is not zero. This causes a bug (which is described in another bug report) where installs do not work. If the ID is zero, then click on Edit and change the PDA ID to another number (I used 5). Then click on Send to PDA and follow the instructions.
If you change the ID, you will have to go back into the Conduits tab (again in gnome-pilot Settings) and enable all of the conduits you want to use.
Once all of this is done, you should find that your PalmPilot is working up to par. Too bad that a distribution such as Ubuntu or Mint (both of which are billed as Linux for the normal person’s desktop) don’t properly support a PalmPilot “out of the box”.
UNIX Administratosphere 