[Sussex] Palm OS, Kontact/Kpim and/or a W98 Laptop???

[John D.]

On Saturday 28 April 2007 21:58:50 RIchie Jarvis wrote:
> Hi John,
>
> I have one of those myself, but have not tried syncing it with Linux yet...
>
> However, a while back, I did get my old 600 syncing with Linux - and the
> first thing i remember is that you need to do a dmesg to make sure that
> the Palm device is detected when you hit the hotsync button on the
> device, as Palm devices only appear then.  I'll have to give my 650 a
> go, and see if I can help you out!
>
> As to wine stuff - I recently started playing myself - it seems pretty
> easy - once you've got it installed, do a wine <program> and it will
> install it under your user dir in ~/.wine/drive_c/<path> - you should
> find the wine file browser on your menu, or you can execute a windows
> prog by cd'ing to it, and doing wine <filename>.  Thats about as far as
> I have got!   Hope it helps....

and

On Sunday 29 April 2007 09:26:28 Colin Tuckley wrote:
> John D. wrote:
> > My palm based Treo 650 is being rather temperamental when syncing with
> > Kontact/Kpim.
> >
> > The Treo 650 normally connects via usb and it _should_  just be a case of
> > starting the kpilot app and hitting the sync button on the palms USB
> > connection lead - but at the moment nothings happening.
>
> check DMESG to see if it's being found when you press the button. If not
> then you probably need to load the appropriate kernel module. I have a
> Handspring Visor (Palm clone) and that needs the "visor" module loaded
> before it will sync on USB

Thanks for the replies chaps.

After doing some more digging and reading, I had some successes. The Treo did 
eventually sync, after I'd "loaded" (? is that what it does) the modules for 
both usbserial and visor with modprobe. For the life of me I can't see why it 
doesn't want to show the Treo as connected when I look with lsusb (or lspci). 
The instructions I found just gave a "bald list" of what I should be doing 
(it was on someones blog so.......). 

I asked at Siduxs' IRC channel if anyone knew how I could make it so that the 
modules where loaded at boot - someone told me about adding them to 
the /etc/modules list - the usbserial starts fine, but the visor didn't seem 
to do the same - I'm thinking that that must be possible but haven't managed 
to work out how it might be done yet.

Actually I also had some progress with Clares laptop as well i.e. in the end I 
just deleted all the connection details etc for it and rebooted. It made the 
various connections/services to the NIC and I just had to add the IP 
addressing info for my ISP/service - which enabled me to sync the device, 
check for any updates and upgrade the Treo firmware to the most recent 
version that Orange provide - the only minor inconvenience is that theres a 
much later version of the firmware that will get rid of all the "Orange 
branding crap" - but it's in zip file format and the instructions explain how 
it's done but the firmware needs to be put onto the expansion card first - 
and I don't have a card reader (well theres one in my inkjet reader but I'm 
not sure if I could utilise it for the job).

It might be nice when this 
http://www.engadget.com/2006/11/07/fics-linux-based-fic-gta001-gsm-smartphone-encourages-hacking/ 
is available - at least it should (theoretically) talk to linux in a much 
more familiar way - I'll have to wait and see.

The device is actually shown (now) if I look for it with dmesg but it's shown 
as being connected to ttyUSB2 and 3 - why that might be I can't fathom and 
since I added the visor module to the /etc/modules list, the app seems to be 
starting twice, it then freezes and goes no further - not allowing any sync. 
So I was going to take it back out of the /etc/modules, as it shows 1 user as 
visor, and gets a mention at the usbserial entry as well as the usbcore 
entry. It's all very confusing as to whats actually going on.

Any further guidance is of course greatfully received.

regards

John D.