Palm Desktop 4.0 released; reader reports

Palm has released the final version of its Palm Desktop 4.0 software for Mac OS 9 and X. It features Mac OS X compatibility, vCard and vCal support, and records marked private can be hidden and forced not to print.

A reader sent us his initial observations, which points out several noteworthy aspects of the installation. He writes:

"The update installs a login item "Palm Desktop Backgrounder" - an 864 k program. It seems to grab about 2% of the CPU, and is not easy to disable, although it appears the Desktop software works fine without it. The Backgrounder is located inside the main Desktop package. To disable it, I had to open the package and manually remove the Backgrounder. Moreover, the installer added all the records from my old Palm Data file to my Apple address book, without notifying me beforehand. I would have preferred an option to skip this step. It also installed Conduits into /Library/Application Support/Palm - even though I opted not to have them installed."

Update: NFS issue Jason Vetter writes: "If you mount your home directories via an NFS mount, you will not be able to hotsync your Palm Pilot. You will not be able to create a user profile. This was a problem in the beta release and still has not been fixed in the final release. I have not found work around, other then creating a local user (home directory resides on the machine) and use that user to sync.

Ingvar Nedrebo replies: "It is actually clearly stated in the installer ReadMe that NFS is not supported. It even says that you have to unmount all NFS disks before running the installer."

Note: Our Mac OS 9 Late-Breakers page also contains important OS 9-related news on the new Palm Desktop software.