Here is a script, pilot-xfer-bt, that will HotSync your Palm over Bluetooth on Linux. I use a Treo 700p here, but this will probably work with other Palms with Bluetooth.

First, make sure your host computer and Palm are paired. Then make sure your copy of rfcomm is at least version 3.23 or later by running ‘rfcomm –help’. As of the writing of this post, very few machines are using this rev, since it is recent. If yours is older, either try updating your bluez-utils package, or download, compile, and install the latest bluez-utils source. All you need is the ‘rfcomm’ binary.

Then edit that pilot-xfer-bt script and make sure that its internal path to rfcomm points to the install directory. /usr/local/bin/rfcomm is probably what you want if you installed from source.

Anyway, to use: pilot-xfer-bt passes its args to pilot-xfer. So in other words, to sync your Palm to a repository located in /home/username/palm, run ’sudo ./pilot-xfer-bt -s /home/username/palm’.

Getting this thing working a few months ago was a bear. There was this nasty timing-dependent bug in rfcomm vs. udev. That took days to puzzle through. At least it’s been fixed upstream.  Anyway, I now know why they call these tools “bluez”

Filed under: code code | 2 Comments
Tagged: bluetooth , hotsync , linux , palm , treo