Installing PalmPilot software

The early PalmPilots came with the Pilot Desktop 1.0, an application that can run on Windows 3.1. However, it uses the Win32s extensions, and these can be tricky to install correctly under WIN-OS2. In fact, OS/2 only supports programs that use Win32s 1.25 or earlier; this is however sufficient for Pilot Desktop 1.0.

Here is the procedure I have used; all I can say is that it works for me. It's convoluted, but I've used it several times without problems. You will need to be able to run DOS and Windows 3.1 to perform a temporary install; this doesn't need to be on the OS/2 machine.

The installation should now be complete. Start up the WIN-OS2 session and try it out.

Yes, this is a bit fiddly and long winded. But it works! And it's fairly obvious that a reinstall of OS/2 only requires Win32s to be reinstalled and the few files to be copied again.

You might also be interested to know about some native OS/2 (well, Java) PalmPilot support; look at http://jsyncmanager.dnsalias.net.

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Last Updated: 31st May 2001
© 2001 by Bob Eager, Tavi Systems