I've been trying to get my Palm Tungsten E to work with Xubuntu -- trying being the operative word.

I can sync via GNOME-Pilot, and I see all my Palm files in a directory, but what do I do after that? I downloaded J-Pilot, and that is not working at all -- the Palm syncs, but it has nothing to do with J-Pilot, and none of the handheld's data is flowing into that program. And every time I reboot, the whole thing goes to hell again.

Somewhere along the way I had to download pilot-link -- if I needed it that bad, it should be one of the dependencies for the other apps when they're installed through Synaptic.

To get the syncing working in the first place, I followed the advice in the Ubuntu forums to do:

$ sudo modprobe visor

(visor? are they kidding?)

and to add a line to fstab:

sudo mousepad /etc/fstab

(substitute YOUR text editor for mousepad, then add the following:)

/proc/bus/usb/ /proc/bus/usb/ usbfs none 0 0

The Web sites for all of these applications are out of date and extremely poor. Yeah, I know it's free software, but it's pretty much useless. If you have to totally geek it to get things working, there should be detailed, comprehensive information somewhere. It's nice to have 18,000 Ubuntu packages, but how many of those apps have real value? That's another question.

On a somewhat related note, I got a nice comment from a guy who works on HPLIP -- the HP printing utility for Linux. I'm still impressed that the program works so well -- and that a big hardware company is investing time and money to make things work better in Linux. Hell, Palm isn't investing in its own brand and on the platforms it already "supports," so why should they invest in Linux?

Getting the Palm Desktop -- an ancient program on both platforms -- running in Windows and Mac is blissfully easy. Getting things working in Linux are just way, way too hard. I'm not saying I won't figure it out but it's frustrating. It doesn't need to be this difficult.

But getting back to Palm and Linux. I tried KPilot in Ubuntu. I did get a sync, but what do I do with it? I was told that it would only dump data into KOffice programs I don't have installed. Then it wouldn't sync ... what did I do wrong? Guess I broke it.

I tried to install the real Palm Desktop software under Wine. Miserable failure.

My best hope is JPilot, which actually looks like it has the facility to handle the main components of the Palm world. I couldn't get it working in Xubuntu ... maybe in Ubuntu. Remember ... if the Web pages for the programs are sparse and haven't been updated in the past couple of years, chances are the project has been abandoned and the apps just might not work.

I know that the PDA is dying, that it only now exists as a value-added accessory to a cell phone. I also knowthat Palm's commitment to the stand-alone, non-phone PDA product is extremely shaky. But Palms are cheap, and I'd love to see a simple-to-configure, bread-and-butter Palm Desktop application that works.