[ILUG] Handspring Visor and Linux

[Niall O Broin]

I replaced my Palm III with a Visor Deluxe - not much change, you might say,
but I got a good deal and it has a better screen and 8M so it'll do me, just
as soon as I can get the bloody thing syncing :-( I've read the various
HOWTOs and I seem to have hotplugging working but can't quite get to the end
of the road. When I try to do  pilot-xfer  without having pressed the sync
button I get, understandably, Unable to bind to port '/dev/pilot' .

If I press the hotsync button on the cradle, hotplugging occurs and
pilot-xfer starts but the Visor and pilot-xfer don't handshake, probably
because I pressed the hotsync button before starting pilot-xfer. If I then
cancel the hotsync on the Visor and hit ^C on pilot-xfer and then try to run
pilot-xfer again I again get the "Unable to bind to port '/dev/pilot'"
message. I have sometimes been able to rmmod visor and usbserial and start
again but the usual result of doing that is that the whole box hangs and
it's reset button time - thank goodness for ReiserFS.

I tried inserting the visor and usbserial modules with modprobe but in some
way this is not quite the same as hotplugging because I still get the
"Unable to bind to port '/dev/pilot'" when I run pilot-xfer. Are any of you
successfully syncing a Visor to Linux via USB ? If so, can you please share
the magic incantations ? I'm using SuSE 7.3 with 2.4.10.



Niall