WARNING! The following article is very old, in fact more than 2 years old!
It's a kind of pain to make work together Linux, AvantGo, Evolution and Sony Clie or any Palm devices. Sony Clie is well recognised by kernels >= 2.4 through the USB Serial converter, and simply linking /dev/pilot to /dev/ttyUSB0 enabled to sync it with most sync tools available in Linux, including JPilot. However, Evolution, which I think is by far the best PIM available in Linux, causes a problem syncing, probably due to its use of gnome pilot. Gnome-pilot seems to have stopped being developed and it hardly has any documentation, as far as I know. But I still wanted to make Evolution and my Clie sync! In addition, I like AvantGo (http://www.avantgo.com), which provides a free service to download news from various sources on the Internet and, again, want to sync through Linux.
Evolution and Sony Clie or any palm devices
There are two issues: one, gnome-pilot does not recognise the Clie, second, even after recognising the Clie, pressing Hot Sync button does not do anything and Clie fails to communicate with Evolution. For the first issue, you first of all need to make sure you have linked /dev/pilot to /dev/ttyUSB0. Try this:
alice# pilot-xfer -p /dev/pilot -b <your backup directory>
If you can backup what you have in your Palm device to the directory you specified, the link is made correct. Once this is done, in Evolution, "Tools" -> "Pilot Settings" and follow the dialog. If nothing happens when you pressed Hot Sync after gnome-pilot asked to press Hot Sync, just go back one step and come back again. Hopefully this will solve the problem.
Once you have successfully done this first step, now is the time to synchronise Clie with Evolution. The problem is that gpilotd, which is used to sync, often causes problems, especially when there are multiple instances of gpilotd running. To prevent this, I run the following script every time I do sync. (Thanks to Jamie Strandboge for the code)
#!/bin/sh
GPILOTD_RUNNING=3D`/bin/ps -A | grep gpilotd`
# first stop gpilot
if [ ! -z "" ]
then
echo "Stopping already running gpilotds"
# stop it properly
/usr/bin/gpilotd-client -p > /dev/null 2>&1
/bin/sleep 2
# stop gracefully if still up
killall gpilotd > /dev/null 2>&1
/bin/sleep 2
# if still running, just get rid of it at all costs
killall -9 gpilotd > /dev/null 2>&1
fi
# now start gpilotd
echo ""
echo "Starting gpilotd..."
echo ""
echo "Unfortunately, this dialog won't give any feedback."
echo "Just watch the palm and when it says it is completed,"
echo "you are done. Press Ctrl-C when done (but don't worry"
echo "if you accidentally close the window)."
/usr/bin/gpilotd >> ~/gpilotd.log 2>&1
# END SCRIPT
This script logs the transaction in ~/gpilotd.log, which you can have a look if you have any problems syncing.
If you still have any problems, send me an email, I will try to be helpful :-)
Linux, AvantGo and Sony Clie
You can not use gnome-pilot to use AvantGo. Instead, I recommends you to use malsync developed by Tom Whittaker (Thanks to Tom for this wonderful program) and you can find everything you need to know about this program from http://www.tomw.org/malsync/. Note that if you sync your Clie with Evolution, then you must download malsync 2.0.7 and pilot link 0.9.5.
