[Techtalk] Success with a Palm m130 and Red Hat

[Beth Johnson]

I just thought I'd put down my experience for posterity, since I
searched all over the 'net for information on how to make this work and
found that no one place had all the information I needed!  I'm running
Red Hat 7.3, 2.4.18-17.7.x kernel, Ximian desktop.

I just upgraded from a Palm m100 (serial cradle) to a m130 (usb
cradle).  I'd been very pleased with how well the Pilot has worked with
Evolution, but wanted a unit with more options and a color screen.

After I had plugged in the cradle and let the Pilot charge for a few
hours I ran lsmod to see what modules I had running (I already had some
basic usb support running; usb-uhci for the chipset and usbcore). 
Nothing for the Pilot (looking for visor and usbserial, visor requires
the usbserial).  So I modprobed for the visor and the usbserial, then I
pressed the hotsync button on the cradle and checked the
/var/log/messages logfile:

Oct 27 19:03:59 SLOBBIT kernel: visor.c: Palm 4.0: port 1, is for
HotSync use and is bound to ttyUSB0
Oct 27 19:03:59 SLOBBIT kernel: usbserial.c: Palm 4.0 converter now
attached to ttyUSB0 (or usb/tts/0 for devfs)
Oct 27 19:03:59 SLOBBIT kernel: usbserial.c: Palm 4.0 converter now
attached to ttyUSB1 (or usb/tts/1 for devfs)

which tells me that the device to link to is ttyUSB0.  So I make a
symlink /dev/pilot which points to /dev/ttyUSB0.  I also chown ttyUSB0
to my username.

Now that I had the system recognizing the Pilot, I need to be able to do
stuff with it.  I found out the hard way that pilot-link doesn't support
USB connections before the 0.10.0 release, and what I had on the system
was 0.9.something.  RPMs for the newest version (0.11.5) would break
dependencies with my version of Evolution (different versions of
libipsock).  Finding the Ximian rpms of pilot-link-0.11.5 on the
Evolution Beta channel convinced me that, yes, I should indeed backup my
evo directory and install the Beta (I had been debating this for a few
weeks).  Doing this also gave me the latest version of gnome-pilot
(0.1.66).  These two packages gave me the tools I needed to actually
talk to the Palm.  Now, it would be great if the distribution would
recognize that this is are valuable tools and make updated, compatible
RPMs available.  I wouldn't expect that everyone would find it
acceptable to upgrade to a Beta program.

Once they were installed I went to the Gnome Control
Center-->Peripherals-->Palm Link.  Up jumps the configuration wizard to
walk me through.  I accepted most of the defaults, but changed the Speed
to 115200.  I selected USB for the connection type and clicked to the
next window.

Here I was asked if I had synced with this Pilot before, I picked "No"
and left the default user name and ID.

Here's the important part, I didn't click "Next" to set the ID, YET.  I
pressed the hotsync button on the cradle FIRST, then clicked "Next" on
the screen.  This is different from serial devices, where you click and
then hotsync.  After this I had the MyPilot directory in my home
directory.

Now that the ID was set on the Pilot, I went to the Palm Conduits window
of the Control Center and for each the addressbook, calendar and todo
list conduits, edited the One Time Action to "copy to Pilot."  I made
sure that I had backed up my Evolution directory (it's a bummer if you
click "copy _from_ Pilot" by accident) and I synced the device.

Ah, synchronization goodness!

Now that I was synced with my stuff on the Pilot, I wanted to put some
other programs, like a document reader and shopping list.  I used the
gpilot-install-file program to do this.  It's part of the gnome-pilot
package.  I make a directory for each program and expand them in the
directory, then run

gpilot-install-file -n filename.ext

It pops up a window and asks me to press the hotsync button to perform
the transfer.  The -n switch stands for now, there's also an -l option
for syncing later.

So now I have all sorts of goodies on my Palm and I'm just starting to
discover the functionality of the device.  In general the syncing works
quite well, but occassionally seems to hang a bit when installing a
file.  Retrying the operation works.

So that's my experience, hope this helps someone else.
regards,
Beth
-- 
  /\/\    Beth Johnson
 / o o\   Cosmic Wonderer
( / ^^\)  Springfield, MA USA
 \ M_M/   "Ruling a country is like cooking a small fish--
           you have to handle it with care."--Lao Tzu