5.3. GUIs: Gnome, KDE

The Gnome IrDA applet is a GNOME IrDA applet for monitoring IrDA devices.

Beamster is a little Gtk/python utility to help with IrDA transfers especially from and to Linux PDAs (ftp://ftp.handhelds.org/pub/linux/dists/familiar/feeds/unstable/packages/armv4l/). It can talk to most handhelds/laptops/printers which use the IrDA Object Exchange protocol (OBEX), in fact any device which already works with the openobex package will work with this. It should be fairly intuitive to use. Make sure that IrDA is 'On', position the two devices, wait for the status bar to show that a new peer has been discovered, choose the transfer mode (use 'Palm3' for PalmOS peers and 'Windows' for everything else) then press 'beam' or 'receive' as appropriate. Note that 'receive' toggles on and off. Tested transfers to and from this IrDA devices: an old Palm3, a Psion 5MX, a Windows 98 ThinkPad and a Linux desktop with an Actisys L220+ dongle.