I took my Handspring Visor Deluxe out of a old box to play with, and was disappointed to discover that Palm's official software fails to install, despite claims of compatibility.

By coincidence, a day later I stumbled across Damien's post about the newest version of this installer destroying people's computers, and I wonder if the misbehaving step is the step that is failing—after reading this warning, I hope so. MacInTouch has some good commentary on this discovery, but their site lacks permalinks, so you'll have to search for it (see 9/5/2005 and 9/7/2005). MacInTouch's running list of Tiger compatibility problems suggests v4.2.1 B (the previous version) might work, but Palm is not making that version available, and it too is known for permissions corruption. That list also suggests that installing as root—and allowing it to trash all the directory permissions unabated—would produce a "successful" install.

There are third-party conduits, but I haven't found any easy answers just yet. The Missing Sync, a commercial third-party conduit that does not depend on Palm's HotSync, does not support the old Visor Deluxe. ColdSync seems promising (if a bit raw), and claims to build smoothly on Mac OS X, but does not compile out of the box with Tiger (probably a gcc 4 thing, but I don't know, and haven't tried it with gcc 3 yet). I bet I'd have more luck running a version of Palm's software for Mac OS 9, using Mac OS X's OS 9 emulator. Unfortunately, I do not have OS 9 installed, and I have lost my Tiger install disc. *sob*

Anyone know of any other options? Is anyone fixing Palm's installer on their behalf, or is it just too busted?