Plucker: An Alternative to AvantGo

Mar 12, '02 10:29:59PM

Contributed by: jambiscuit

I bought a Palm m125 the other day and was excited to try AvantGo, only to find that they don't support OS X. So I started looking for alternatives and found Plucker, a free offline HTML viewer with conduits for UNIX, Linux, and Windows. There's no GUI for OS X (it's possible that the UNIX/Linux GUI will work if you have XWindows running), but getting the command line tools up and running is fairly straightforward:

To find out how to do this, read on...

  1. Download and install Python, either as a precompiled binary from here or get the source from Python.org website and compile it yourself. I compiled it from source with no problems.
  2. Download the 'binary version, with parsers' from the download section of the Plucker website and install the viewer_en.prc and SysZLib.prc files to your Palm.
  3. Using the terminal, cd to the unix directory in the plucker folder, su to root, and run install-plucker:
    $ su
    $ cd .../plucker-1.1.14/unix/
    $ ./install-plucker
    You'll be prompted to answer a bunch of questions about where the Plucker files will be installed--the defaults worked fine for me.
  4. Plucker uses a config file called .pluckerrc. A sample can be found in plucker-1.1.14/parser/defaults. Copy this file to your home directory and rename it .pluckerrc. Then make a new directory in your home directory called .plucker and copy the file called home.html to it:
    (if you're still root, exit)
    $ cp .../plucker/parser/defaults/pluckerrc.sample ~/.pluckerrc
    $ mkdir .plucker
    $ cp .../plucker/parser/defaults/home.html ~/.plucker
  5. Alright, this is it! Run Plucker by typing
    $ plucker-build -f home .plucker/home.html
    An output file called home.pdb (change the word after -f to whatever you want the doc to be called) will be placed in your .plucker directory. Edit the home.html file to include the sites that you want processed.
As for the lack of a GUI, I don't even miss it. I put together the following shell script that's run by cron every morning at 8:00am, I hotsync at 8:15, and I'm out the door.
#!/bin/sh

plucker-build -f home .plucker/home.html ;
cp ~/.plucker/home.pdb ~/Documents/Palm/Users/MyUserName/Files to Install ;

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