Maybe I spoke a little too soon.

The new version of Linux I've installed (Fedora Core 3 Test 2) was going swimmingly until I tried something new -- getting my Palm Pilot connected. The version I'm using is, of course, very much on the bleeding edge, so I asked for this.

The first time I tried to synch with the Linux PC nothing happened. I tried lots of different things and, in the process, discovered that the operating system was seeing the device well enough (the system logs duly noted the connections and disconnections). It was the software above that -- gnome-pilot -- that wasn't working.

OK, I asked for help in the usual Linux way: I posted a query to a mailing list. Within a few hours, I got a reply that worked. Or at least gnome-pilot now saw the palm. A synch later and... now there are two of everything (contacts, calendar items) and about 50,000 (that's a guesstimate) blank to-do items. OK, so I should have probably set things up so that the information is just copied off of the palm the first time.

Now that I have everything supposedly working, I'm waiting for the synch to finish. I've been waiting since around 3 this afternoon. It's now after 8pm. I can tell things are happening because there are files on my disk, with names that you would expect (calendar.ics, calendar.ics-pilot-sync-evolution-calendar-1430.db, etc.) growing in size. Just very, very slowly...

Grrr. As usual I'll forget this pain once everything is up and running again, and then will turn into one of those fanatics calling for the downfall of Microsoft. So I better write this down before I forget.