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Getting Palm's HotSync to work after getting a new Mac...

hacks

So this was a pain in the ass... basically, no matter how many times I uninstalled and reinstalled the Palm Desktop for Mac OS X version 4.2.1, I would consistently get an "Unexpected error #- 50" and a dialog box that would say:

"The application "HotSync Manager" could not be launched because of a shared library error: "

After some sleuthing and this tip from a Macosxhints post, "Make Palm HotSync work in Panther", I established that there are some things that the Palm Desktop installer does that need root access (and their shit-for-brains coders didn't think to ask you until way late in the install process for the root password!).

Here's a solution that should work for everyone:

  1. Uninstall the Palm Desktop by firing up the installer you used to install it (if you can find it) and choosing "Uninstall" instead of "Easy Install". If you don't have the installer you used to install the Palm Desktop, you should download the version 4.2.1 of the Palm Desktop software from Palm's website and install it over your current system (even though it's broken in this manner) and then uninstall it.

  2. Get Pseudo from Brian Hill, uncompress it and copy it to your /Applications/ directory. You can drag applications onto Pseudo and it will run them as the root user.

  3. Drag the Palm Desktop Installer onto Pseudo (which is packaged as PalmDesktopMac421EN.sit and contains the installer called "Palm Desktop Installer".) .

  4. Go through the Palm Desktop Installer install process.

  5. Viola! It should now go through the whole process without saying "Installation was unsuccessful" and prompt you at the end to set up a new user.

  6. You can now transfer over stuff you had on your Palm to the new version of Palm Desktop but you'll have to be able to remember the password for your palm (if you've set one).

UPDATE [2005-04-07 17:34:35]: (This is for Google's spider) I've seen some hits from google come to this page given the following phrase: "hotsync manager could not be launched because shared library error"