After almost 16 months of waiting, the first new version of pilot-link is now available for testing. The last version of pilot-link, 0.11.8, was released back in September of 2003. Its been a long time coming!

In this release, a lot has changed. The commandline tools are much more stable, the main library now supports many more devices and platforms, and code has been refactored and cleaned up in a LOT of places, and MANY other things have been added or removed.

...but we're not done yet. This is only a pre-release, and there is still more work to be done before we get to a 0.12.0 final release. Many of us are already using 0.12.0-pre1 daily for our production use. It is very stable, and works well for most current devices that we've had the time and resources to test (this does not include the Palm Tungsten T5, however. There are significant OS-level bugs with that device that are keeping us back at the moment, from supporting it fully).

STRONG WARNING: Do not install this release into a public location if you use a graphical application to sync your Palm device, such as J-Pilot or Evolution. While this release is stable, those applications have not been fully ported to the new code found in pilot-link 0.12.0, and they will cause problems. One main purpose for this pre-release is to get the code out there into developer hands, so they can begin the short porting process to move their code to our new API found in 0.12.0, and hopefully through the next few major releases.

KPilot's latest code in CVS does work with 0.12.0-pre1, however. If you're interested in using that, please grab their code and build it against your freshly-compiled pilot-link 0.12.0-pre1.

With the final release of 0.12.0, we expect that these applications will be fully functional with the 0.12.x API.

DO NOT PACKAGE THIS UP TO PUT IN LINUX DISTRIBUTIONS! You have been warned.

Many people have contributed to this release in various ways. Though there are far too many to mention by name, there are some names that are especially important to mention. Thanks go out to (in no particular order) Florent Pillet, T. Joseph Carter, Adriaan de Groot, Angus Ainslie, Judd Montgomery, Stephan Bösebeck (Java bindings), Nicholas Piper, Greg Kroah, Neil Williams (manpages), and dozens of others. Without them, this would never have been possible.

Also, lets not forget one commercial company who has been using pilot-link in their flagship product: MarkSpace,
makers of The Missing Sync, are using pilot-link behind the curtains of their product. With the introduction of 0.12.0, Missing Sync is now quite a bit more stable (and faster) on OSX, due to some fixes we've added. Through the work of Scott Gruby and others at MarkSpace, we've received some patches back that have helped us continue to improve the codebase.

Feature List

Here's a short list of only some of what you can find in this release (it is by no-means exhaustive):

• VFS support for reading and writing to external storage media, such as MemoryStick and SD/MMC cards. We haven't yet worked out how to create or remove/rename directories, so you can only install files to the main root directory for now. More robust functionality will come soon
• Large Segment Support: pilot-link 0.11.8 had many issues with segments that were larger than 64k in size. It strictly adhered to the Palm guidelines regarding these segments. Many Palm software vendors ignored these guidelines, including Palm themselves, and pilot-link would crash. This problem has been alleviated, and crashes due to "large segments" should no longer occur.
• Native OSX support! Thanks to Florent Pillet, pilot-link now works on Apple OSX using Darwin USB. To use this, simply use the port designation of 'usb:' (minus quotes). You'll see a tremendous speed increase and stability on this platform.
• libusb support. We now support libusb on Linux (and maybe on FreeBSD, need testers). When you build, just make sure to use --enable-libusb to get that support. This is not the default, because we haven't yet verified that it works on every device and every kind of host hardware. The port designation to use is 'usb:'. This is not the same as Darwin USB support. If you build pilot-link for OSX with --enable-libusb, things will break on that platform.
• popt support. Conversion of the previous getopt/getopt_long to popt. This gives us some advantages in parsing commandline parameters and passing them to other tools. We've also done some work to "normalize" the common options that we were using across all conduits. These may change and get further cleaned-up through the next few releases.
• New conduits. Several new conduits have been added to pilot-link, with more to follow as time and code permits:
  1. read-screenshot: Now you can synchronize Palm screenshots captured with ScreenShot from LinkeSOFT GmbH. read-screenshot was written by Angus Ainslie.
  2. read-veo: Another conduit from Angus Ainslie. read-veo will allow you to fetch the images created by the Palm Veo Traveler camera device.
  3. pilot-wav: Written by David Turner, pilot-wav allows you to fetch the "Voice Memo" records from your Palm device and convert them to .wav format on your desktop.

...and many other fixes, features, and additions have been included in this release.

Reporting Bugs

If you find any bugs with this release, we want to know about them. Please search the pilot-link bugtracker for your bug first, and if your bug is not found, report it. Try to be as detailed as possible. The more detail you leave, the faster we can try to help you.

Live Chat

We also have an irc channel dedicated to pilot-link support and development. Many of the authors, maintainers, and contributors are there every day, at various hours and timezones. Come join us and talk about the project!

Downloading the Source

Checksums for the source tarballs below is as follows:

0eb1208d3b0f9e31267267f1519fea38  pilot-link-0.12.0-pre1.tar.gz
ce2186709610888a6b9fcc8eb9f76cb7  pilot-link-0.12.0-pre1.tar.bz2

To download the pilot-link 0.12.0-pre1 "Polarity" release, please follow the following links:

FruitSalad Mirror (thanks to Adriaan de Groot)

pilot-link-0.12.0-pre1.tar.gz

pilot-link-0.12.0-pre1.tar.bz2

Katerina Mirror (thanks to Justin Paulsen)

pilot-link-0.12.0-pre1.tar.gz

pilot-link-0.12.0-pre1.tar.bz2

GPG signatures are found below. To verify these, follow these instructions:

pilot-link-0.12.0-pre1.tar.gz.asc
pilot-link-0.12.0-pre1.tar.bz2.asc