Hotsyncing J-Pilot to Palm

Has anyone successfully Hotsynced a Palm handheld to a One, yet?

I use a Palm m125, and I've had no trouble USB-syncing this with all my old Win boxes, and the family Ubuntu desktop machine. However, I'd really like to keep it synced with my main machine, my AA1 110Ab.

The trouble seems to be with the way the One mounts its USB ports. Things like memory sticks and printers just get polled and addressed as block devices, mounting in a very 'dynamic' way, with the OS creating a new entry in /dev/USB/... each time something is plugged-in. Plug in a Palm via a cradle, and nothing happens. Well, if you press the 'sync' button on the cradle, an entry appears, but J-Pilot needs a 'static' USB device, not one just-created. I've even tried re-editing the J-Pilot preferences on-the-fly as the cradle creates a new /dev/... entry, but that fails. Oh, yes, I've even tried changing the /dev/... entry's permissions.

So, am I missing something obvious, like a kernel module or some other patch?

At the moment, I'm moving my stuff back-and-forth between the AA1 and the Ubuntu box, just to keep the Palm and the One chiming together. There has to be a better way...

 

There is something screwy about Linux support for Palm devices at the moment - I have had trouble getting kpilot to work for some time.

One thing to check is that the visor module is getting loaded. Beyond that, I can't help I'm afraid, as I can't get the damned thing to work either.

 

Thanks,

I'll check for the visor module.

FWIW, if you need to move files between machines on a stick to do a 'back-door' sync, you need to copy all the following between the .jpilot directories:

*.pdb
*.pc3
Saved Preferences.prc

I believe the .pc3 files hold the newer copies of edited records, so J-Pilot can make 'informed decisions' about what to overwrite. I could be wrong on this, but J-Pilot doesn't seem to update edited records if these are not copied.

There is a possibly useful side-effect of this tedious procedure; your information is stored on no less than FOUR volumes, and if you create dated directories on the stick each time you do the round-robin transfers, you have a complete audit-trail of snapshots.

Oh, well, I'll report in if I find a solution; meantime, all suggestions are welcome.

 

Thanks, that's helpful.

Ah, I knew there had to be an upside to this! ;-)

 

I think we're barking up the wrong tree here.

The visor module is blacklisted in Fedora 8 by default.

If you update pilot-link via yum, you can run

Code:

pilot-xfer -p usb: -l

all day long and not get a connection.

If you instead run

Code:

sudo pilot-xfer -p usb: -l

you can see it's connecting. (Press hotsync button when it says "Waiting for USB connection...")

But j-pilot only wants to work with /dev/pilot. So, maybe gnome-pilot or kpilot? But they want to install their entire desktops along with themselves...

I tried everything from http://www.harald-hoyer.de/linux/console_acls_for_palm to no avail. Changed all his "palm" to "Handspring" as lsusb shows "Handspring Visor" when I press the sync button.

Has anyone had any luck yet?

 

No, jpilot works with libusb too (this is actually the preferred method theses days). You need to configure jpilot to use "usb:" as the port in the preferences. You can still use the old kernel modules if you want, but the timing of pressing the buttons is very tricky on newer palm devices.

 

I attempted to use the libusb method, but it will only work as root, as noted above.

The ownership does not get set right on the generated device when using "usb:"

I have tried several rules files with no success. As soon as I run pilot-link suid root, it works fine.

 

OK, it sounds like the brain dead policykit configuration in Linpus (only root have access to hardware devices) strikes again. Try my config file located here:

http://www.aspireoneuser.com/forum/...k=t&sd=a&hilit=policykit.conf&start=40#p35003

 

Hello, I got this working after many hours digging through old bugzilla comments.

Please see my guide. Make sure you rmmod and blacklist the visor module if you loaded it.

http://www.aspireoneuser.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=8113