Adding a Palm to Kubuntu Linux

May 27, 2007 on 8:04 am | In Computing |

This morning I have been able to solve one of the problems with Linux I carried with me the longest, that is over three years by now. Some distros will automatically recognize your palm (=the way it should be), but most of them don’t, so you’re left rather alone without digging deeply into USB literature.

Adding a Palm in Linux is very straight forward and not hard at all. With

tail -f /var/log/messages

active in a terminal you press the Hotsync button and look for the tty address the Palm is hooked up to. Once you know that, you enter that value (e.g. /dev/ttyUSB0 will do the trick in most cases) in the setup of your linux pilot software (I use kpilot) and off you go.

The problem starts to get nasty, however, when your Palm connects with your Linux kernel, but no tty node is being created. In this case, your tail -f will show something comparable to

May 27 08:02:17 viper kernel: [ 2206.484000] usb 1-2: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 7
May 27 08:02:17 viper kernel: [ 2206.652000] usb 1-2: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
May 27 08:02:59 viper kernel: [ 2249.336000] usb 1-2: USB disconnect, address 7

To create the missing node with udev, you first need to write a rule in

/etc/udev/rules.d/

I found this out with a lot of googling and these two very hepful tutorials: UbuntuGuide, Andreas Haack’s Palm Treo 650 And Linux Howto.

Especially the second is the most extensive literature you can find on Palms, Linux, and USB. It systematically takes you through all the steps required to hook up your Palm.

BTW: I still had no node when using the tip from the UbuntuGuide, but it worked when I added in my rule the

SUBSYSTEM=="tty",

from Andreas’ howto. My final rule looks like this:

BUS="usb", SYSFS{product}="Palm Handheld*", KERNEL="ttyUSB*", SUBSYSTEM=="tty", NAME{ignore_remove}="pilot", SYMLINK="pilot", MODE="666"