How to Sync your Palm with Ubuntu

What I am using right now is actually a MacBook with OS X to do proper syncs with my Palm with Palm Desktop.

While that works, I am using Ubuntu right now and I much rather sync with it natively. Right out of the box, Ubuntu comes with gnome-pilot and Evolution.

Strangely, to setup gnome-pilot, I right clicked the task bar and then selected "Add to Panel."

Then I added the Pilot Applet to the task bar. (I think there is supposed to be an applet in my task bar but I don't see it in my install, this is why its strange).
It will ask if you already sync'ed your Palm with another PC. I don't know if it matters but I choose yes.

For my connection setup, I selected "USB:" as my device.

Then I loaded up Evolution and went to Edit>>Synchronization Options
Went to conduits and enabled everything.

To activate the sync, I would go to my Palm Pilot and manually tap "HotSync."
Everything should sync now.

There are a few drawbacks, I can't store applications and files onto my SD card through HotSync. Palm Desktop can do it in OSX which is frustrating.

There are actually a lot of applications that can sync a Palm Pilot. I have not tried them all but they all look easy to use. A short list would be : Jpilot, Kpilot. I didn't like them because I like using Evolution and I didn't see a way for them to sync to Evolution. In all truthfulness, I would much rather have a better way to sync to Google Applications but Evolution does the job.

To transfer files/applications to my palm, I use the following command in the terminal:
gpilot-install-file -now (or -later) [filename]

"-now" will ask you to conduct a HotSync immediately on your Palm while "-later" will wait till the next time you HotSync your Palm.

I basically gave up on my Windows Mobile phone, the HTC Prophet.

The primary reason was that it was too slow to use. It also had a small and low contrast screen. It made reading notes and ebooks difficult, actually to the point I never ever use the PDF or ebook applications unless I was absolutely bored. Obviously, it does not play well with Linux (wonder why^^). I will wait until I get a faster smartphone before using them again.

So I swapped back to my old Palm Zire 72 with its weak battery (have to charge it everyday, no question) and old school OS. Its quite fast since there isn't much that can go wrong (no wifi, no useful bluetooth support, no filemanager, etc). Oh, I am a big fan of Palm's handwriting input, Jot. It is by far the best I've used and I am much faster with it than with my pen tablet, my smart phone, and Vista's handwriting support.