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Palm 3xe and Pilot-xfer

I ordered a Palm 3xe off ebay a few weeks back. It arrived pretty quickly, but the dock I thought I still had from when I had a Palm 3e a few decades back turned out to actually be the dock for my defunct Sharp Zaurus.

I ordered a dock from the Palm Doctor web site. Then I couldn’t find my USB C to USB A adapter to use with one of my USB A to Serial adapters. So I ordered a USB C to Serial adapter.

The dock arived last week. The USB C to Serial adapter arrived today.

I remember using a program called pilot-xfer to move data to/from the Palm, so I went looking and found a git repo for pilot-link.

What follows are really just notes in case I need to do this again.

pilot-link

pilot-link building

Before building I had to run configure and tell it where to install and what the build host was. It couldn’t figure it out with the various checks. So, to install it to my home, I did this:

./configure --prefix=/home/hafl --build=aarch64-unknown-linux

That build string I figured out by looking in /lib/gcc/ for something beginning with aarch64 (uname shows the PinePhone Pro machine as being aarch64).

To build I had to edit some .c files to change a #ifdef fence around some #defines that were needed.

These are the files:

src/pilot-read-notepad.c
src/pilot-read-palmpix.c
src/pilot-read-screenshot.c
src/pilot-read-veo.c

And the blocks that had to be modified:

# if (PNG_LIBPNG_VER < 10201)
#  define png_voidp_NULL (png_voidp)NULL
#  define png_error_ptr_NULL (png_error_ptr)NULL
# endif

I had to remove that first and last line in each of the above files.

Then, to build, I just did a make and a make install.

make
make install

running pilot-link

My device permissions weren’t quite right, so I did a chown hafl /dev/ttyUSB4 but I plan to add my user to whatever group can touch the device and call it a day. My username on the phone is hafl.

I was then able to back up my Palm Pilot thusly:

    mkdir backup-test
    pilot-xfer -b backup-test -p /dev/ttyUSB4

Press the button on the cradle after running the command.

Why /dev/ttyUSB4? Well, I did ls -lart /dev before plugging in the device and after and just via eyeball noticed there was a /dev/ttyUSB4 after plugging it in.

Time to go find those apps…

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