[TriLUG] kpilot (Palm Pilot under KDE/Linux)

[Christian J Hedemark]

Tanner wrote:

> You haven't given us nearly enough information to help you try
> and solve your problem.  You said you downloaded evolution.
> Where from?  What distribution are you running?  How much
> have you updated it?  While griping may make you feel good,
> it does nothing to help solve your problem.

I downloaded the latest available binary and source RPM's from ximian.com as
of last night and this morning.  I am running Red Hat 7.2 on x86.  I have
applied Red Hat updates for any of the packages already installed on this
system by Red Hat, but the updates are no newer than one month old.  If it
will help, I can privately email the output of "rpm -qa"

The griping doesn't feel good.  None of this feels good.  My complaint is
that this is a whole lot more difficult than it needs to be.

Here's the md5sum and results trying to install Evolution:

[root at crab rpm]# md5sum evolution-1.0.1-ximian.2.i386.rpm
791e3c6b68a1758ce52ccadbf2813009  evolution-1.0.1-ximian.2.i386.rpm
[root at crab rpm]# rpm -Uhv evolution-1.0.1-ximian.2.i386.rpm
error: failed dependencies:
        bonobo >= 1.0.14 is needed by evolution-1.0.1-ximian.2
        libgtkhtml20 >= 0.16.1 is needed by evolution-1.0.1-ximian.2
        gtkhtml >= 0.16.1 is needed by evolution-1.0.1-ximian.2
        libgal18 >= 0.18.1 is needed by evolution-1.0.1-ximian.2
        bonobo-conf >= 0.14 is needed by evolution-1.0.1-ximian.2
        libnss3 >= 0.9.5 is needed by evolution-1.0.1-ximian.2
        oaf >= 0.6.7 is needed by evolution-1.0.1-ximian.2
        libbonobo_conf.so.0   is needed by evolution-1.0.1-ximian.2
        libgal.so.19   is needed by evolution-1.0.1-ximian.2
        libgtkhtml.so.20   is needed by evolution-1.0.1-ximian.2
        libnss3.so   is needed by evolution-1.0.1-ximian.2
        libsmime3.so   is needed by evolution-1.0.1-ximian.2
        libssl3.so   is needed by evolution-1.0.1-ximian.2
        libgpilotd.so.1   is needed by evolution-1.0.1-ximian.2
        libgpilotdcm.so.1   is needed by evolution-1.0.1-ximian.2
        libgpilotdconduit.so.1   is needed by evolution-1.0.1-ximian.2
        libpisock.so.4   is needed by evolution-1.0.1-ximian.2
[root at crab rpm]#

> For the record, I use gpilotd and evolution to sync my
> Palm V.  I use the gnome control center to configure it
> (and I don't even run gnome, I run windowmaker).
> I run Mandrake, so I downloaded evolution 1.0 from
> the latest mandrake cooker.  I used mandrake's
> urpmi program to automatically download all it's
> dependencies.  I don't believe redhat has a similar
> type of tool (but hey, urpmi is gpl, hint, hint :-),
> but you can download the srpm, and with a simple grep
> through the spec file find out that:

[snip]
> As long as you make sure your system has those
> "BuildRequires" packages, you should be able
> to build evolution by just downloaded the
> latest rawhide package and saying

This was part of the point I was trying to make.  This is insane... to
install one application you have to hunt down and download upwards of 20
others.

> So, in conclusion, if you want help, please give us more information
> (at the very least the distribution/version).  And don't be so
> quick to give up.

Well I am not giving up (have been working 24 hours straight on this) but I
am very disappointed.  Recently we have been talking here about how to
appeal more to business users.  The first executive that tries to get a palm
pilot working on Linux is going to go running back to Windoze.  I value the
time and help you are offering but I sit here with my 56K dialup modem,
looking at around 100MB of downloads to get a 1.0 mail client working with
Palm support, and wonder if it is worth it to try to nurse my modem along
for the day or so it will take to download it all.  All for what, email?

In the meantime, the Palm software that ships with Red Hat hasn't been
updated in almost 2 years.  It is broken.  The KPalm daemon sometimes
starts, sometimes doesn't.  When it does start, it starts to sync and then
when it kicks off the KPalm desktop app, both the PC and the Palm sit there
and wait for the other one to say something and the Palm times out first.
Funny thing is, it worked flawlessly one time.  No changes to the
configuration, just added some more addresses to KAB and *boom* it went into
this state where it starts the sync job and then hangs.  The KPalm daemon
becomes very unresponsive after that.  It has no documentation, according to
the developers web site, and there is not really any useful help feature in
it either.

The frustrating thing is, I've been an IT professional for 8 years now and
working with UNIX heavily for 5.  This shouldn't be this difficult.  If it
is this hard for me, how in the heck can I evangelize Linux to other people
and recommend it as a desktop replacement?  Sorry if constructive criticism
about Linux makes some people uncomfortable or even angry, but this is going
to hold Linux back until the big distros stop focusing so much on the kernel
and start improving the userland experience.  The kernel works.  Now take
that elite army of coders and fix the things that have been neglected for
years in userland.  :-)