Introduction

PalmOS devices, including the PalmPilot, the Palms III, IIIx, V, Vx, VIIx, m100, and now m500, etc., the Handspring line of personal digital assistants (PDAs), the Sony Clie, and so on are the most widely used type of PDA in the market, recent inroads by the so-called PocketPC notwithstanding.

These devices are particularly popular with the techno-geek crowd , to which your bending author himself belongs. Linux was, of course, built from the ground up by techno- geeks . It follows quite naturally that good support for PalmOS devices would indeed be available on the platform.

The support ranges from very traditional command- line-based tools through general-purpose GUI tools, through tools closely tied to particular X desktop managers, and on to tools for actually writing PalmOS applications. (Yes, that's right. Not only does Linux make available industrial-strength development tools for PCs, it also offers all the tools needed to build Palm applications!)

In this chapter we will introduce some (but by no means all) of the tools that allow you to make use of your Palm-type PDA with a Linux-based PC. We will in passing mention some of the development tools. But since this is not a programming book, we will do little more than tell you where to find more information. We will also spend a little time talking about some of the third-party applications for Palm-type PDAs and some of the issues they present when using such a device with Linux.

Also, this chapter will seem to be a completely gratuitous attempt to inflate our page count, because it has more screenshots in it than any other chapter. I won't apologize for this. Those of you who have PalmOS devices already know what we are talking about here. What you want is some guidance to help you choose the tool that's right for you. Seeing how these packages do their work is the only way to make that choice, hence all the pretty pictures (so perhaps this is a bit of an apology after all).

One more note: We will use the terms palm, Palm, pilot, and PDA interchangeably throughout this chapter. In every case we mean one of the PalmOS-based personal digital assistants, without regard to a particular model or manufacturer.