Palm GnuKeyring Conversion to KeepassX

I was a very early user of the original PalmPilot device. Way back when I actually had the PalmPersonal syncing with my ’90s era Sun Microsystems SPARCstation 4 work calendar and email, etc. I eventually moved on to a Treo90 which I think was the optimal personal organizer of its era (I ended up owning three of them over time, ultimately).

Sadly, the Palm solution no longer is feasible, even under Linux. The deal breaker for me was the lack of being able to dependably sync my google-based calendar, etc. with the Palm. So time to move on, which I did for most everything, but…

I had been using J-Pilot’s Keyring plug-in to manage my set of passwords – I hung on to this handy tool until I finally became unable to use J-Pilot to sync via USB with my Treo and was forced to manually sync my password info across my desktop and netbook. Enough became enough!

Research discovered that the excellent Windows application KeePass had been ported/reinvented for Linux, Mac (and even Win) as KeePassX. As a free open source application with excellent encryption, it was an obvious solution to fit my Linux-based environment (and my wife’s Mac). A side benefit was that there was even a KeePass version available for my J2ME-based mobile phone, so the Palm-type “on hand at all times” capability could be available once more. All these versions could work from the same password database file format, so syncing a file across them would enable the info to be always up to date anywhere I would be!

My final concern was how to get my all my existing Keyring data into that KeepassX solution. Well it turns out that someone else named Wouter blazed my trail there through a similar migration and it only required minor changes to work perfectly for me. Here’s what I did to modify Wouter’s method to suit my needs.

Note: when Wouter refers to extracting the file saxon.jar from the Saxon downloaded zip file, the actual file name is saxon9.jar. Also the Jochen Hoenicke conduit to export the Keyring file to XML is actually named export.jar, not xmlexport.jar as in Wouter’s command line.

So I gathered all the files into the working directory as Wouter recommended. I then executed the (modified) command line
java -jar export.jar Keys-Gtkr.pdb MY-KEYRING-PASSWORD-HERE > keyring.xml
which created the keyring.xml file.

I paused here to go into the XML file and make edits as required to clean up my old Keyring data, as it was much faster to do it here in bulk rather than the one-record-at-a-time editing that would be possible in the KeepassX GUI application. For instance, in Keyring there was no dedicated URL field like in KeepassX, so I had put them all in a notes field before. Now I moved them all over to the dedicated field. In other places I had comments in the user name or password fields, but these totally screw up the Autotype function in KeepassX, so I moved or deleted them. Once this was done I could move on to the next step from Wouter.

I executed
java -jar saxon9.jar -xsl:keyring-to-keypassx.xsl -s:keyring.xml -o:keypassx.xml
to create the final KeepassX XML import file. This was then able to be opened in KeepassX successfully with all my data in the categories I had originally set up, etc. Great stuff – thanks, Wouter!

Next step is to get KeepassX installed on my other machines and set up a Dropbox or similar synch mechanism to keep them all aligned automagically. That will have to wait for tomorrow!

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2 Responses to Palm GnuKeyring Conversion to KeepassX

  1. Pingback: Password and Files Encryption/Sync/Backup: Gettin ‘er Done! | A New Don

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