Sunday, 10 February 2002
Getting the Palm Desktop beta and sync software set up on Mac OS X. The installer wants to erase the old version, so I did the volume mounting/unmounting dance in order to prevent it from doing so. Unmounting volumes, or more generally, disk arbitration, in Mac OS X is really fragile, it often unmounts more disks you want, Disk Utility is flaky remounting them, its interface is really horrendous. And I had to futz around with vsdbutil, mount and umount -f to get everything to work. Yeesh. Definitely the signs of an extremely immature OS.
First time I tried to enable my serial port (Griffin gPort, which just uses the internal modem interface and Apple's SCCSerial driver), my Mac froze (the mouse moved, but nothing else). Bizarrely, at the same exact moment, my SGI started forking processes madly, to the point I couldn't even run 'endsession' (the logout program) or start a shell. I wasn't doing anything more than checking my mail on it! So I had to reboot both machines on my desk. The second time, I was very careful and did 'tail -f /var/log/system.log' ssh'ed to my Mac from my SGI before I enabled the serial port, and everything worked. Weird.
So far, it seems that the reliability of HotSync is greatly improved in Mac OS X, compared with syncing in Classic (which I was doing) or in Mac OS 8/9. It's still slow, being serial, especially performing a full backup as it's doing while I'm writing this, but I can deal with that.
Next thing to try is syncing in both Mac OS X natively and Classic. I had that brainstorm yesterday afternoon—I can just sync the conduits I need in 9 (primarily AvantGo), and then I can move everything else to OS X. Palms are designed to sync to multiple computers, so this should not be a problem. I'll have to swap cables: Classic will use the Keyspan USB-serial adapter I have, and OS X will use the gPort. The only thing I am afraid of is that it looks like OS 9 Palm Desktop (2.6.1) is aware of OS X Palm Desktop's (4.0b77) existence.
And what happened to 3.0 anyway? Answer: 3.0 is the new Mac OS 9 version.
4:12 AM
