Getting online with a Palm Pilot

In the last post I revived a Palm Pilot Professional boasting 1MB of memory and installed an app via HotSync. This time we step things up double memory capacity and get it on the Internet to access Internet Relay Chat (IRC)

Upgrading the Palm Pilot Professional

PalmOS 2.0 is quite limited in terms of what apps you can get. A large percentage of apps need at least PalmOS 3.0. So I was quite keen to upgrade. The stock Palm Pilot Professional comes with 1MB of memory and PalmOS 2.0. You can upgrade to 2MB and PalmOS 3.0 by swapping out a memory in the compartment on the top of the back of the device.

You need to get a Palm 2MB Upgrade — I picked up one of these for £9.99 on eBay brand new still in its wrapper…

Before upgrade:

After upgrade:

Connecting to the Internet

After seeing this video, I wanted to give getting online on a Palm Pilot a go. Firstly you need to install pppd. On a Debian based distribution you do this with the following command:

apt-get install pptpd

Now you need to connect up your dock and work out where your serial port is, probably /dev/ttyUSB0. Now you need to configure iptables to forward traffic from your Palm Pilot to your Internet interface (swap out eth0 for the interface you use to connect to the Internet, for example, this could be your Wi-Fi adapter).

iptables -t nat -I POSTROUTING -s 10.0.0.0/8 -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE

Finally start pppd ensuring you swap out /dev/ttyUSB0 for your HotSync cradle serial port:

pppd /dev/ttyUSB0 19200 10.0.0.1:10.0.0.2 proxyarp passive silent noauth local persist nodetach

Now onto your Palm, head over to Preferences > Network and click Details on a connection profile. Here you can select PPP as a connection type and set DNS server and IP address to match your PPP configuration. See the video I mention above https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbH8P3nQb-s by
theguruofthree which is very clear and this is what I referred when getting started — Thanks!).

You should now be good to connect:

As you can see I installed this app upIRC to give this a test:

upIRC

There you have it a Palm Pilot connected to the Internet. Next up is writing your own custom Internet enabled apps.