PDA Connectivity

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Fedora provides programs and clients for use with Palm-type personal digital assistants (PDAs). You can use these programs to transfer information to and from a PDA, send and retrieve email, manage and sync your calendaring programs, and more.

Command-Line PDA Software for Fedora

The most popular PDA-related software suite is the collection of utilities included with the pilot-link package. . You can use this application from the command line to perform a variety of tasks with your Palm, Handspring, Handera, TRGPro, or Sony PDA, including the following:

  • Extracting and uploading addresses

  • Installing date book information

  • Transferring text memos to and from the PDA

  • Managing PDA to-do lists

  • Managing user settings

  • Sending and retrieving email documents

  • Installing new PDA programs

  • Backing up, syncing, and restoring the contents of a PDA

  • Acquiring expense database account information.

You use pilot-xfer without. a GUI to perform many of these tasks; the suite of commands includes 31 separate programs. After configuring the software, determining the proper serial (or USB) port, and connecting the PDA to a desktop or notebook PC that is running Fedora, you can back up the contents of the PDA with the pilot-xfer command, like this:

 $ pilot-xfer  p /dev/ttyS1 -b backupdirectory 

This command automatically creates a directory according to the name following the -b option and then downloads and saves the contents of the PDA in the designated directory. The full set of pilot-link commands is explored in the man page for pilot-link.

GUI PDA Client Software

Fedora provides the GNOME gpilot graphical. interface to these commands, which is not included as an item in the menu system. Fedora does provide a Gnome panel applet that can be configured by starting it from the command line as

 $ gpilotd-control-applet & 

which leads you through a setup wizard that does little more than allow you to configure the port and sync the PDA.

We recommend either of the two following GUI applications, which provide more features.

Another graphical PDA client, shown in Figure 9.8, is the comprehensive J-Pilot application. It will manage, retrieve, install, back up, and sync any information for your Palm-related PDA. You can click on the Date Book, To-Do List, Address Book, and Memo Pad buttons to perform related tasks. You use the Sync and Backup buttons to update or preserve a copy of a PDA's data. Open this client by choosing J-Pilot from the Accessories, More Accessories menu.

Figure 9.8. The J-Pilot PDA client supports PalmOS devices, shown here syncing with one.


NOTE

Fedora provides several mail clients for your use with Evolution (a Microsoft Outlook work-alike) being provided as the default. All the mail clients were covered in detail in Chapter 8. Graphics applications, including The GIMP, are discussed in Chapter 10.


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    Red Hat Fedora 4 Unleashed
    Red Hat Fedora 4 Unleashed
    ISBN: 0672327929
    EAN: 2147483647
    Year: 2006
    Pages: 361

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