Palm Pilot to REX-3 address converter
Hello Linux, Palm Pilot and REX users! This page contains a quick and
dirty hack that allows you to copy an address database from the Palm Pilot to the Franklin REX-3 under Linux. This is as far as I got on one sunday and
it allowed me to transfer all my addresses, which I couldn't do under
windows, because somehow the combination of Rex, Truesync
Plus and Palm
accessor didn't work for me. This hack is by no means a perfect
solution, but I just put it up here for other people who might be in a
similar situation, and because I'm convinced that it's a good thing to
put out information as early as possible. I'm interested in connecting
the REX completely to the pilot-link suite or
the netscape address book, or other existing scheduling and address
management applications for Linux/UNIX, but I'm not sure yet what
would be the right choice. Ok, here's the deal:
Requirements
The converter is a tcl script and you will need the following things:
TCL-TK, actually ontly the tclsh by now, but I will add a GUI eventually anyway,
The pilot-link suite to sync your pilot addresses to a readable ASCII file,
The Rex Linux connectivity pack which is available for beta testing now in the Truesync developer network.
The converter itself
Usage
After installing Tcl-TK, pilot-link, connectivity pack and the LINUX PCMCIA support according to their respective documentations, do the following:
download the converter, make it executable, and issue the following commands:
addresses /dev/pilot > pilotaddr.txt
When you press the hotsync button, this generates an ASCII file with all your addresses in it (including the private ones, even if they're hidden!!!). You mustn't have more than 4 categories, since the rex can't handle more. Now say:
./pilot2rex pilotaddr.txt rexin.txt
This will create a second file in the format of the rex connectivity pack. So now you can say:
RexConnect -f /dev/mem0c -i rexin.txt
If you get an error message near line 1, check your permissions on the memory device. You either have to be root or set them to 777.
Attention!
This process erases whatever was in your rex before. This is not because it wasn't possible otherwise, but because of lazy programming on my part ;-). Since it is neither clear what the final rex connectivity pack will be like, nor what we (I HOPE I DON'T HAVE TO DO THIS ALONE) will finally connect it to, I figured that's fine for now, because it did what I wanted.
If you have a use for this or would like to help or have a good suggestion, what organizing software to support under Linux, let me know!
The URL of my homepage is http://www.butz.org/~butz/
and my email is butz@cs.uni-sb.de.