I've been using PalmOS for about 8 years now, and recently got an n810. I've got most of my "critical" data moved over now and thought I'd share how it went. I run Ubuntu on my desktop, so Linux was a selling point of the NITs for me. My first goal for the migration was to get every bit of data that I might someday want to use off of the Palm and into a reasonably obvious and open data format. That way if I never use PalmOS again I don't have to go hunting down ways of accessing .pdb files. My second goal was to get the data that I use most often onto the NIT so that I don't need to carry my PalmOS device anymore.

Calendar

After searching around and trying several of the PIM tools out there, I settled on GPE. I used DateBk5 on my Palm, and it is vastly more featureful than anything I've found for the NIT. I thought I might be able to run DateBk5 under Garnet VM, at least for a time while I got my data migration worked out better, but I couldn't get DateBk5 to install on Garnet VM.

To migrate, I synced my palm data with Evolution using gnome-pilot. In Evolution, I chose Actions->Purge to get rid of older entries to reduce the amount of data to migrate. Then I closed Evolution and took a copy of ~/.evolution/calendar/local/system/calendar.ics
DateBk5 has several features which it implements by putting strange-looking strings into the 'description' field of each entry. Simply importing calendar.ics into GPE's calendar left all the strange strings. It also left DateBk5's "floating events" in the calendar, which are really more like Todo items.

I wrote a python script to remove the DateBk5 strings and output all the "floating events" into their own file while converting them to iCalendar Todo entries in the process. Since GPE does not support repeating Todo items, I put any repeat strings at the end of the description so possibly I can use them later, or at least I can see what repeat intervals I had set on things. A final cleanup I did was to change the Category on each of these floating-event-turned-todo items to "tickler", since I used them mainly as a tickler file on PalmOS.

After using the script to clean up the iCalendar, I was able to import into GPE's calendar pretty well. I did that by copying the .ics file onto the NIT with scp. I then opened GPE Calendar and used File->Import. While debugging the script I was able to reset GPE's databases by ensuring that all the GPE apps were shutdown (including the GPE Summary applet) and doing 'rm -rf /home/user/.gpe' from the xterm on the NIT.

My biggest disappointment with the GPE Calendaring solution right now is the alarms. As best I can tell, GPE must be running for alarms to trigger. There are bug reports on maemo.org about alarming in general being flaky on OS 2008 so for now I will just make due without them.

Todo List

Similar to calendaring, I synced my Palm todo items to Evolution and used its Actions->Purge function to get rid of old items. Then I closed Evolution and took the iCalendar file from ~/.evolution/tasks/local/system/tasks.ics

I was able to import this file into GPE's Todo application by way of the GPE calendar. I clicked on the same File->Import option in GPE calendar and the Todo items went into the Todo database. One gotcha: the GPE Todo application must be run once first to initialize its database (located in the /home/user/.gpe directory) or the import will fail.

Address Book

I never used the Address Book app much on PalmOS, and had long ago just kept a vcard file with my contacts in memopad. I was able to import that vcard file into the GPE Contacts app with no problem.

Notes

The "memo_file" sync option in Gnome-pilot keeps a nice directory of textfiles of all the memos. I haven't migrated too many of these to the NIT yet, but it seems to be trivial. Mainly I just need to decide how to keep them, whether in a specialized note-taking app, or TiddlyWiki, or as plain files in the filesystem.

Passwords

I used STRIP on the Palm, which is like Password Safe and keeps an encrypted database of all my passwords which I can unlock with a single master password. Since allowed notes to be attached to each entry, I put various other bits of information about my financial accounts in there too. There are several programs like this available for the NIT, but none seemed ready for primetime. The most promising, Password Safe, didn't have a way of importing a file for a Linux user. On Windows, I can imagine somehow importing the file into the desktop version, and transferring it to the NIT since they use the same file format. The other NIT crypto apps seemed to be either abandonware or were not reassuring that they used sound crypto techniques.

My solution so far was to use Palm-Zetetic-Strip to get plaintext data out of my STRIP .pdb files. I hacked that to generate a proper CSV file, and along the way noticed that it wasn't exporting one of the STRIP database fields. I used
gpg --symmetric --cipher-algo 3DES passwords.csv
to encrypt the file on Linux and then I put it on the NIT. The NIT's gpg can decrypt that file. With no gui, I must do this from an xterm, and I must remember to remove the decrypted file whenever I'm done using it. However, I can trust that the file itself is pretty secure. Someday I'd like to figure out how to get dm-crypt running on the NIT for full-partition encryption.

HandyShopper

HandyShopper is a convenient list-making app on the Palm. I never got into it for shopping lists, but I do use it for packing lists for trips. I used HandyShopper's export function to export the list data into memopad files. So far I have only just copied those text files onto the NIT, but I'm hopeful that the multilist app may be useful here.

Eatwatch

This is a weight tracking tool that is part of the Hacker's Diet. Though I don't have in mind a particular tool to replace this on the NIT, having the data in a usable form was enough for now. The Hacker's Diet site provides some C tools for extracting the data from the .pdb file into a CSV file, so I've done that.

FuelLog

This app tracks gas mileage. I had used it for a while and wanted to save the data. It has a built-in export function that generated a CSV file in the memopad database. I used that and archived the data on my Linux PC. It looks like a fuel logging app is available for the NIT.

Progect

This is a free project-planning software that was popular for a little while on the PalmOS. I haven't used it in years, but wanted to archive my old data from it. It has an export-to-memopad function which I used.

SuperMemo

This is a flashcards app. I had previously written a script for extracting the data from its .pdb files into plain text files, so I ran that again.

Left Hack

A nifty tool on the Palm would put almost all the scrollbars on the left side of the screen instead of the right, which was much nicer for left-handed use. A search of the ITT forums for "left scrollbar" turned up some great tips which did the same thing on the NIT for everything but xterm.

MyBible

This is a pretty nice PalmOS bible reading software. On the NIT, Rapier is the only thing I've seen so far. I was hoping to use Garnet VM to run MyBible on the NIT and have access to the NIV text I purchased, but MyBible failed to install. Since the text data is highly compressed and obfuscated, migrating it to Rapier is out. For now I can use one of the translations in Rapier. Another option the NIT makes more useful is reading one of the online versions.

Syncing

Since Linux traditionally didn't have great support for syncing the data on PalmOS devices, my sync usually just consisted of backing up the device using pilot-link. With Ubuntu I do a fancier GUI-based version of that. Apparently GPE can now sync via opensync, but the process still seems to involve compiling the latest sync tools. I'm hopeful that the next Ubuntu release at the end of April will have newer versions that can work out of the box. In the meantime, I plan to use rsync to backup my data from the NIT. I do my other Linux backups via rsync so this should work nicely. It's also handy that I can do those backups over wifi with the NIT.

Script Offers

I'm willing to send the migration scripts I used to anyone who wants them. Perhaps I can attach them as another post. They are:

fix_datebk.py for cleaning iCalendar files synced from DateBk4 and DateBk5 (maybe DateBk6 too) for use with GPE.
strip2csv.pl for extracting STRIP password data to a CSV file
parse_supermemo.py for extracting data from Palm Supermemo files

Hi,

You may want to have a try of KeepassX. It is a password manager which supports secent encryption and runs on Linux/Mac/Win and very recently maemo.

http://www.keepassx.org/news/2008/03/42
http://qt4.garage.maemo.org/dists/ch...rmel/keepassx/

Note I use this on Win + Mac as my 770 struggles a bit with OS2008.

Cheers,
John

I'm looking for a good iSilo and HanDBase replacements.

- I tried using PLUKR desktop to convert HTML sites to use with FBReader and didn't like the results. I ended up simply copying to my ITT the entire HTML file tree for a given document and using the web browser for viewing. iSilo let me search from top to bottom but I don't think the browser can search the entire folder tree.

- Still haven found that good DB program. Datable seems promising but sqlite3 seems to conflict with something I have in my ITT. I never got it to import my HanDBase db csv files.

Frank

Keepassx looks like it could be pretty good. Unfortunately it has some issues with dialog boxes being a little too tall for the screen. Sounds like that is being worked on though. Appreciate the tip.

I too have been wanting to migrate from Palm OS, but this is way to much fooling around for me, as I know NOTHING about Linux or writing scripts.

Just confirms that for me at least, the N810 is OUT, unless someone writes a decent PIM suite and there's an easier way to access things like MyBible...

I don't know linux; can you give me some tips for installing? I clicked on the 'garage' link, but the install failed, saying 2 files missing; libqt4-core and libqt4-gui. Then I clicked on the keepassx linl; downloaded linux package KeePassX-0.3.1-bin.tar.gz.

What's my next step? Thanks in advance.

The only one you need is this one:
http://qt4.garage.maemo.org/dists/ch...osso_armel.deb
Download it to the tablet then use the application manager and select install from file ...

Disclaimer: I haven't tried this at home yet

There is also this bible software

http://www.internettablettalk.com/fo...ighlight=bible

You could actually go to http://qt4.garage.maemo.org, install the repository and use the application manager to install keepassx.

Which fuel logging app did you find for NIT? That is one thing that is still making me carry my Sony Clie around;