Years ago, when I was still at school, I bought a Palm Tungsten T3 PDA. A few days ago, I resurrected the device (i.e. replaced the battery and started using it again).

The PDA still works fine, however Bluetooth HotSync doesn't work anymore since the required Bluetooth-daemons on the Linux-side are deprecated.

I looked around for a long time until I found an implementation of rfcomm.py in the bluez-compassion project here. The original script can emulate the necesarry rfcomm server, but lacks an implementation of the PPP frontend. Furthermore, it is limited to either stdin/stdout or two separate named pipes - both of which can't be used for pppd.

I modified the code to include support for Pseudo-Terminals (pty) and direct launching of pppd. So far, it works fine for me, even though the PPP connection parameters are currently hardcoded in the file.

Furthermore, if you want to use it, you need to configure “sudo” so that it allows running pppd without a password for your user. I did this by adding the following line to the sudoers-file (allowing members of the group “sudo” to run pppd without a password): %sudo ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:/usr/bin/pppd

Just run./rfcomm.py -D for dund support. On Arch, you need to prefix it with python2, since it seems to only work with Python 2.

You can find and download the code at code.rnb-consulting.at/source/pd.

After you have set up the connection, you can network hot-sync, in my case, j-pilot is the only application that's still available. I'm currently looking into syncing my NextCloud-data (Contacts, Addresses) to the device.