Economy Size Geek

Ok I have a Palm Pilot m500. Which I love! Yesterday it fell out of my pocket during a meeting and I had a frantic 30 minutes while I searched for it. This made me realize that I haven’t synced the Pilot on my new laptop. It turns out that the last time I sync’d was over two months ago - sure I put it in the cradle to charge once a month - but no backup. This is not a good situation

So I hooked up my Pilot to my laptop fired up J-Pilot and hit sync. No joy! Some kind of error. Now you have to understand that the way Palm + USB + Linux works is a little weird. You see the Pilot isn’t recognized by Linux until you push the Hot Sync button on the palm itself. This fires up the USB connection which tells Linux to create a couple of devices ttyUSB0/1 . Then J-Pilot checks for those an syncs. I could see the kernel add the devices in the syslog but J-Pilot refused to talk to the Pilot.

Permissions!

Yes it appears that I the lowely user do not have the permission to access these devices. Which is a problem because if you change permissions on the devices while they exist - those permissions get wiped when the pilot stops syncing because Linux actually deletes the devices.

What to do?

Well it turns out that this whole thing is now controlled by udev rules. I found this Guide to writing udev rules that helped me sort it out. I basically added a MODE=”0777″ to the auto created devices and there was rejoicing thru the land.