PIM syncing via gnome-pilot
 

I've been throwing around the idea of synchronization of data between my desktop computer and my Nokia 770. Specifically, my end goal is to be able to synchronize (via USB) between Evolution on my Linux desktop and some PIM application (JPilot?) on my Nokia 770, using the Nokia 770 in USB device mode.

If I could modify gnome-pilot or pilot-link to understand and synchronize with USB-based file systems (e.g. mounted to /media/whatever), I could potentially utilize the existing gnome-pilot Evolution plugin (with perhaps a bit of modification) to synchronize between Evolution and a directory structure on the Nokia 770.

At first, I was considering JPilot as the target PIM application on the Nokia 770 (or possibly DejaDesktop), but the work on eds-dbus (the "Embedded Evolution Data Server") being done by the folk at openedhand.com could make the whole concept a lot easier. I'm wondering whether to even bother trying to hack up something else.

Assuming, however, that I'm an impatient person that can never wait for anything, does my proposal sound like a reasonable approach? A few caveats that I can already see:

• The JPilot directory (~/.jpilot) would have to be symlinked to a directory on the MMC card.
• You'd have to plug the Nokia 770 (or the MMC card directly) into the PC and mount it.
• Synchronization would have to be initiated on the desktop side (or maybe by autodetecting the automount).
• I think JPilot would have to be restarted on the Nokia 770 after the synchronization.

These are hardly serious issues, though. One bonus of using gnome-pilot/pilot-link is that the functionality can be initiated via the command-line instead of requiring Evolution. I'm not sure how much of gnome-pilot/pilot-link I can actually reuse, though, since my impression is that they're very Palm-oriented, though maybe that's a good thing since JPilot (and it's data back end) is also Palm-oriented.

Any thoughts or suggestions?

That would be great. But since Jpilot already runs on the desktop and 770, would it be easier to do the sync with some sort of an rsync script? Perhaps wirelessly? I started to write a script, but it seems the data files are encoded differently between the 770 and the desktop version of jpilot.

I noticed the same thing when trying to transfer all my old Palm PIM data from my PDA to JPilot (on the desktop) to JPilot (on the Nokia 770). The Dates database was the one I had most trouble with, but the Notes were the only things that transferred smoothly. Now I'm focusing on sync'ing with the Exchange server at my workplace (through Evolution and its evolution-exchange capability), which will probably be more useful to me in the end.

I have been trying for quite a while to get the DatebookDB to transfer, but I am getting nowhere. No matter what changes I make, Jpilot on the Nokia will not see any Date data, or crash. I compared DatebookDB.pdb and Datebook.pc3 files created on the Nokia to those created on the desktop and think I have them in same encoding, but still no joy. Did you ever get your dates to transfer? If so what did you do? I was able to get Address and Notes to transfer. My versions of Jpilot are the same on both devices (0.99.8) so you would think the data files would be interchangeable. I really would prefer not to use .csv import as I would like to get a wireless sync set up.


TIA Bob

I was unable to transfer dates in any useful format at all... even the .csv import messed up the data beyond usefulness. It must be some bug introduced in the Nokia 770 version of JPilot, although I can't imagine why that code would have been changed.

Anyway, I personally am not considering a direct JPilot-JPilot sync, simply because I don't really like JPilot on the desktop, and it can't sync with an exchange server. Evolution w/ exchange support is nice, so if I can get Evolution to sync with JPilot on the Nokia 770, I'll be all set.

Thanks for the reply. It least I know that I am not going crazy. I agree, Evolution sync would be ideal.