Chapter 2. Configuring the Palm handheld

Many Palm handheld devices internally support networking, which allows you to do all sorts of neat things. To configure it on your Palm handheld, you will have to perform several steps.

Tap on your Application launcher icon, and go to Prefs. You should be presented with a screen similar to the image shown below:

Figure 2-1. Changing the Network Preferences

On the Preferences main screen, you'll see a dropdown menu in the upper right corner. Tap on that menu, and select Network from the items listed.

The next screen you are presented with is one which which lists the default Network template. If you haven't changed this, this should be Aimnet.

Figure 2-2. Selecting a Service Template

Tap the Service dropdown, and select Unix from the items listed in the menu there, as shown below:

Figure 2-3. Selecting the Unix Service Template

In this template, you will need to change a few options to allow it to work with your ppp daemon which will run on your Linux desktop. Tap on Details on the bottom of the Unix template. You should see a screen similar to the one shown.

Tap on Details on this screen, and you will now be shown a form for your Login script.

We are going to modify this script so you can connect directly to the desktop over PPP. It is not the same style login as a telnet login for example, which would expect a "..ogin:" style login prompt, and a "..assword:" style password prompt (the first letters are ommitted in this because some systems will use "Password" and others will use "password" (upper and lowercase 'P', respectively. Using "..assword:" as the matching criteria ensures that your script will continue to work with both styles of systems). You should see something similar to the following:

Figure 2-4. Modifying the Login Script

If you want to do some advanced configuration, you can also statically assign a DNS and IP address to your Palm device here. Simply remove the check from each of the boxes, and manually enter the data into the fields as shown.

You might want to use these fields if you were doing your own DNS, or if you didn't have control over a server which could deal with your requests for hosts from the Palm device itself. I've only had to use this in a case where my local DNS was down, but the network was up, so I statically assigned an address of an external DNS I know was functioning.

Also, you can do some ip_forward rules and assign your Palm an address on the 192.168.x.x or 10.x.x.x network, and forward those requests out through your net-connected machine. In the case where an ISP doesn't assign more than 1 static address to a client, or you ran out of addresses to use, you can use this method to maintain a connection. This is discusssed later on in this document.

Figure 2-5. Adding DNS Servers

Now tap on the "Script..." button on the lower right of the "Details" form. In the upper left of the Login Script screen is another dropdown. This screen is where you could custom build a login session, using all of the proper login and password prompts automatically scripted through. In the case of pppd on the Linux desktop, you don't need to use any type of login or password prompts to log in, so we'll "shortcut" the script here, and make it end immediately, which basically makes it a blank script.

Tap on the menu, and select End from the list (it's at the bottom of the list). This will then clear all of the entries below it, basically disabling the script from being parsed at all.

Tap on Ok on the Login Script dialog, then Ok again on the Details dialog as shown below.

Figure 2-6. Shortcutting the Login Script

You now have to set the serial port speed to it's maximum supported value for your version of the PalmOS.

Tap on the HotSync icon from your Application launcher, then tap on the menu silkscreen icon, and select Connection Setup from the menu (or tap on the menubar to expose the menu if you're running PalmOS version 3.5 or higher).

You will now see a series of connection types listed here. If you're planning on connecting your Palm device to the internet through a cradle or HotSync cable, select Direct Serial from this list and tap Edit.

Figure 2-7. Modifying the HotSync Preferences

An edit dialogue will pop up. From this dialogue, you want to select the Connection Method. In most cases, it's safe to leave this alone, but if you were doing IrDA for your connection type, you could select IR to PC, or IR to Modem (as shown below). Tap on Details on this screen.

Figure 2-8. Modifying the Connection Method

This Details screen lets you choose your port speed. On slower machines, you may need to back this down to a reasonable rate, or on hardware that does not support modern UARTs. In most cases, the default of 57,600 is probably good enough, but you can safely set it for 115,200 without a negative effect.

Figure 2-9. Modifying the Serial speed

If you wanted to use IrDA to connect to the Internet, you can configure similar options for port speed. Simply select the dropdown on the Edit menu and select IrCOMM to PC or IrCOMM to modem if you were using a modem to dial in (not covered in this HOWTO). Change your port speed to match 115,200 as described above, and you should be all set. This is not normally recommended for a type of connection to the internet because any bumping or moving of the Palm handheld will break the IR beam and drop the connection.

Figure 2-10. Selecting IrDA instead of Serial