1. Introduction

PalmOS is the operating system used by the Pilot, PalmPilot, WorkPad, Palm III, Palm IIIx, Palm V, and pdQ smartphone devices. Each of these gadgets is a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) and comes with programs to help the user keep track of personal information, such as addresses & telephone numbers, meetings, todo lists and general notes. In this way, they replace the traditional paper address book, calendar and notepad. PalmOS devices improve on earlier PDAs in that they can synchronize their data with another computer. Of course the other computer must have compatible software in order to communicate with the PalmOS device. This software is often referred to as a conduit. Although 3Com does not support Linux conduits, Linux developers have provided a wide variety of applications which share data with PalmOS devices.

1.1 This Document

The latest version of this document can be read at http://www.orbits.com/Palm/PalmOS-HOWTO.html, and is part of the Linux Documentation Project (LDP). This document superceedes the previous version, which was called the Pilot HOWTO. See http://sunsite.unc.edu/LDP/ for further information about the LDP and other HOWTO documents.

If you find anything in this document which needs to be corrected or better explained, please send me e-mail at the address above and specify which version of this document you are referring to.

This document is Copyright © 1997, 1998 & 1999 by David H. Silber. It is released under the copyright terms in the LDP HOWTO-INDEX document.

1.2 See Also

The http://www.orbits.com/Palm/PalmDevelompent-HOWTO.html document describes how to use the gcc-based development system to write Palm OS applications.

The http://www.orbits.com/Palm/PalmConduit-HOWTO.html document describes how to use the pilot-link libraries to write Linux-resident conduits for use with Palm OS devices.

You may also wish to look at http://www.orbits.com/Palm/ for updates on the status of these and related documents.