Getting j-pilot to sync with Sony Clie

[Stokstaartje]

I was wondering if anyone has been successful in setting up j-pilot to sync with a Palm, in this Sony Clie peg-sj30. It is connected via a USB port.

I read in the j-pilot manual to link the port with /dev/pilot and to give read/write access to the port via chmod 666.

How do I figure out to which port the palm is connected?

Anyone done this before succesfully?

[kukibl]

Try with dmesg when you plug-in your Palm:

Code:

$dmesg | tail

Output of command will probably show you which device node is created.

[Stokstaartje]

The problem seems to be that as user I get a permission denied error. As root I can sync. I have chmod 666 /dev/ttyUSB1 or even chmod 777 /dev/ttyUSB1 but to no avail.

Syncing as root is cumbersome. Is there another way around this?


p.s. Even though syncing as root is possible, I then get an ID error, claiming that the Palm device has a NULL ID. Extra bonus points for fixing that one :-)

[GrannyGeek]

I *used to* be able to sync with my Clie as user in 5.9 Deluxe, but now I can sync only as root. If I try as user, I get this message:

me:$ jpilot
pi_bind error: /dev/ttyUSB1 Permission denied
Check your serial port and settings
Exiting with status SYNC_ERROR_BIND
Finished

I checked before I synced and the permissions on /dev/ttyUSB0 and /dev/ttyUSB1 are 0666. So permission should not be denied.

I had the same problem during beta testing but uelsk8s provided a solution involving udev. But those changes seem to have been incorporated in VL 5.9 Standard Gold.

I found several Google hits with the same problem but no solution.

Odd, very odd. Did an update to something screw things up?

Any ideas gratefully received, especially if they solve the problem.<g>
--GrannyGeek

[rbistolfi]

I would run udevmonitor and then plug the pda to see if that gives any clues.

[derrell]

If anyone is still interested I poked at this long enough to finally get it let me sync my sony clie handhelds without being root.  This might break something else but I haven't had any problems yet, your mileage may vary.

Add this rule to a file in /etc/udev/rules.d that is numbered lower than what in there already.  I used 05-local.rules as the file name, I already had it to control several usb hard disks that I swap around.

Code:

KERNEL=="ttyUSB[13579]", SUBSYSTEMS=="usb", ATTRS{product}=="Palm Handheld",  SYMLINK+="pilot", GROUP="users", OPTIONS+="last_rule"

Adding the last_rule option is what made it all work.  There is something down stream that is changing the owner and group of /dev/pilot -> /dev/ttyUSB1 -> tts/USB1 to root.  I never did find where it was happening. 

Also setting the group to users is probably not the most secure thing to do either so you might want to think about that. 

If you want to change the rule around to catch different palm devices this command will give you the information about what is hooked to ttyUSB1.  Run it after you hit sync on the palm or ttyUSB1 won't exist yet.

Code:

udevinfo -a -p $(udevinfo -q path -n /dev/ttyUSB1)

[GrannyGeek]

I just tried this fix and it works! Thanks so much.
--GrannyGeek

[derrell]

Glad it helped. 
If anyone is interested in writing their own udev rules to make external devices mount in the same location every time here is a link to a howto.
http://reactivated.net/writing_udev_rules.html

This is really handy for things like an mp3 player or usb hard drives that you use on a regular basis.