I've been searching around on the internet trying to find out about conduits and options for syncing programs with my Palm Pilot device. Google searches turn up a lot of discussion on the matter over a two or three year period, everything from people talking about doing it or how it should be done or how much they want it done.
But I can't actually determine what, if any, tangible projects are out there for doing any kind of Palm syncing.
The two programs I would most like to sync with my Palm are Thunderbird (just the addresses, not the email) and GnuCash (via FreeCoins?).
It would seem I'm not the only one who would like to do this, and there are tantalizing hints that there are possibly conduits either in development or beta for doing this.
But I seem to be wading neck deep in lots of online forum discussion that is obscuring my path to finding out what the actual status is.
Is there anyone on this list who knows what is possible as far as syncing with a Palm Pilot goes, where I might find concrete answers, and/or how I might best configure it on my system?
Dave
On Sat, 2005-09-10 at 12:34 +0900, Dave Gutteridge wrote:
I've been searching around on the internet trying to find out about conduits and options for syncing programs with my Palm Pilot device. Google searches turn up a lot of discussion on the matter over a two or three year period, everything from people talking about doing it or how it should be done or how much they want it done.
But I can't actually determine what, if any, tangible projects are out there for doing any kind of Palm syncing.
The two programs I would most like to sync with my Palm are Thunderbird (just the addresses, not the email) and GnuCash (via FreeCoins?).
It would seem I'm not the only one who would like to do this, and there are tantalizing hints that there are possibly conduits either in development or beta for doing this.
But I seem to be wading neck deep in lots of online forum discussion that is obscuring my path to finding out what the actual status is.
Is there anyone on this list who knows what is possible as far as syncing with a Palm Pilot goes, where I might find concrete answers, and/or how I might best configure it on my system?
----- my perusal of the system shows little progress made on integration of syncml into Thunderbird and some made into Sunbird (calendar) - I'm sure you have your reasons to like Thunderbird over Evolution but you can get your address book sync' easily with Evolution - apparently not with Thunderbird (don't let me be the last word on this).
FreeCoins seems to have one primary driver behind it and the forum there apparently has a gnucash developer that's interested in integration but it does seem that development is slow - I'm going to presume that you saw this forum note but just in case you didn't...
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php? thread_id=7315982&forum_id=1089
Seems like you might get something usable eventually, the timing of course isn't clear.
Craig
I'm sure you have your reasons to like Thunderbird over Evolution
Not particularly good reasons, really. Just that I liked FireFox, and Thunderbird is by the same people. That and I was using Thunderbird on Windows before, so it seemed like the easiest transition.
I'm willing to give Evolution a go, though, if it syncs "easily" with the Palm.
I installed it and I'm experimenting with it, and I came across a slight snag. I wanted to see if I could import my address book from Thunderbird to Evolution, and found this script on the web: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=288831 So now I have a perl script which can theoretically do just what I want... but I don't know how to run a perl script. It seems it's one of these things that's so obvious to people who know that they don't bother explaining it anywhere. I've tried typing the name of the script, puttins "sh" and "perl" in front of it... but no results. And there's no documentation for this particular script because, well, it's obvious to everyone else. How do I run this thing?
FreeCoins seems to have one primary driver behind it and the forum there apparently has a gnucash developer that's interested in integration but it does seem that development is slow - I'm going to presume that you saw this forum note but just in case you didn't...
Yes, I came across that thread. I'm willing to accept that I may not get GnuCash syncing with my palm the same way PocketQuicken sync'ed with Quicken. Can't have everything. But I do want to know where I should be listening for when the feature hopefuly becomes available.
Dave
On Sat, 2005-09-10 at 17:53 +0900, Dave Gutteridge wrote:
I'm sure you have your reasons to like Thunderbird over Evolution
Not particularly good reasons, really. Just that I liked FireFox, and Thunderbird is by the same people. That and I was using Thunderbird on Windows before, so it seemed like the easiest transition.
I'm willing to give Evolution a go, though, if it syncs "easily" with the Palm.
I installed it and I'm experimenting with it, and I came across a slight snag. I wanted to see if I could import my address book from Thunderbird to Evolution, and found this script on the web: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=288831 So now I have a perl script which can theoretically do just what I want... but I don't know how to run a perl script. It seems it's one of these things that's so obvious to people who know that they don't bother explaining it anywhere. I've tried typing the name of the script, puttins "sh" and "perl" in front of it... but no results. And there's no documentation for this particular script because, well, it's obvious to everyone else. How do I run this thing?
---- it would have been easier if you had just quoted the script than to make me download the thing.
It would appear that you first export your contacts to some tsv file (I don't have Thunderbird installed)
then usage would be..
perl tsv2vcf.pl file_exported_by_tbird.tsv \ file_to_be_imported_into_evolution.vcf
this comes from my read on lines 35 & 36 my $in = $ARGV[0]; my $out = $ARGV[1]; ----
FreeCoins seems to have one primary driver behind it and the forum there apparently has a gnucash developer that's interested in integration but it does seem that development is slow - I'm going to presume that you saw this forum note but just in case you didn't...
Yes, I came across that thread. I'm willing to accept that I may not get GnuCash syncing with my palm the same way PocketQuicken sync'ed with Quicken. Can't have everything. But I do want to know where I should be listening for when the feature hopefuly becomes available.
---- don't know - not high on the vitality scale - contact the authors directly.
Craig
it would have been easier if you had just quoted the script than to make me download the thing.
I didn't know I could do that. In any case, your instructions were very helpful. Others might want to note that it's not obvious how to export a tsv file from Thunderbird. In the Address Book | Export feature, you can select "tab delineated" as a file type, but they don't show any .tsv file extensions as an option. So you need to select tab delineated, and then it will output a .txt file. Then you rename it so it has a .tsv extension, and then after that the script works fine.
Now I have all my contacts in Evolution. I'll see if I can sync them with my Palm, and if so, I may become an Evolution convert.
Thanks for the helpful suggestions and clear instructions.
Dave
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Craig White -
Dave Gutteridge