MAL conduit setup help for Vindigo

[Richard Zach <zach math berkeley edu>]

Dear Jake:

This is in response to your recent query on the gnome-pilot list,
archived at
http://mail.gnome.org/pipermail/gnome-pilot-list/2000-July/000961.html

The current version of the MAL conduit for gnome-pilot does not work
with MobileLink versions greater than 3.0.  Vindigo packages MobileLink
v. 3.3.  I don't know if Vindigo requires MobileLink 3.3 on the Palm; if
it does, it won't work with gnome-pilot until that is updated.  I
downgraded the MobileLink on my Visor from 3.3 to 3.0 and got the same
results with the gnome-pilot conduit that I got with malsync:

The gnome-pilot MAL conduit is actually based on malsync, a console tool
by by Tom Whittaker, in turn based--I think--on the MobileLink code
released by AvantGo.  It is available at http://www.tomw.org/malsync/. 
The current version malsync 2.4 works with MobileLink 3.3.  

I tried out Vindigo.  Here's what I did:

1. Downloaded the Windows installer from vindigo.com
2. Ran the installer under Windows
3. Took the 4 files created (libmal, MobileLink, Vindigo, and
VindigoChannels) and installed them using pilot-xfer.
4. Put in the server information in MobileLink

This put Vindigo on my Visor, and it seemed to be working fine.  In
order to fully support Vindigo under Unix, you'd have to eliminate step
(2), i.e., provide some way to download the bare Vindigo.prc and
VindigoChannels.prc files.  These seem to be dynamically generated since
Vindigo knew that I wanted the San Francisco version.

After running/syncing with malsync, it also created the various
databases it does (VSync, VSyncPatches, VindigoUser, VindigoHistory,
VindigoPrefs).

The syncing did not create any error messages and things seemed to
happen (a log created with malsync -g is attached).  I can't tell if it
actually did sync ordinary content (movie times and such). It did,
however, NOT change my city information after I had changed it on the
Vindigo server.

Maybe the best strategy to get Vindigo to work on Linux/Unix is to first
get it to work with malsync, since this will allow also people who don't
use gnome(-pilot) to use it (e.g., users of KPilot, JPilot, or
PilotManager).  I cc'd this email to Tom Whittaker, who might be
interested in making this work.

Incidentially, what will the implications be for development of MAL
conduits for Unix since AvantGo closed-sourced MobileLink?  See
http://www.mobilelink.org/

Best regards,
Richard Zach

mallog