PalmPilot: The Ultimate Guide, Second Edition

Installation Directions and “Gotchas”

The pilot-link package is distributed under the GNU Public License as source code “tarred and zipped” (.tar.gz) in a single file. After you download the file from the Web—or copy it from this book’s CD-ROM—the file is unzipped and extracted into a directory called /pilot-link-0.9.1 (or whatever the current version number is). You must now compile the source code files by first running configure and then make.

The programs then rely on two environment variables being set: PILOTPORT and PILOTRATE. If you don’t set these variables, PILOTPORT, the serial port with which to connect, will default to /dev/pilot, and PILOTRATE, the speed of your PC’s serial port, will default to 9600 bps. You can also override PILOTPORT’s default by explicitly specifying the serial port on the command line.

At this point, you should create a pilot device file (/dev/pilot). Doing so will simplify things and, once created, will serve other PalmPilot desktop packages, such as KPilot, that you may install later.

To create a pilot device file, use superuser (root) privileges to create a symbolic link called pilot to the appropriate serial port in the /dev directory. For example, if the cradle is attached to the second serial port (or COM2) of your PC, type:

               /dev$ ln -s /dev/cua1 pilot

In addition, change the permissions on the file so that it can be read from and written to by all programs by typing:

               /dev$ chmod 666 pilot 

or:

               /dev$ chmod a+rw pilot

pilot-link Advantages

If you’re ...