Re: syncing over USB

[Matt Davey <mcdavey mrao cam ac uk>]

On Thu, 2005-02-10 at 03:22, Larry Siden wrote:
> I experience the same trouble that others have syncing over USB.  I
> know from experience that the work-around is to open the Pilot
> Settings applet, edit the device setting for the USB, make sure it's
> set to "serial", then hit the sync button on the cradle, then hit "OK"
> to close the dialog and applet.  However, when I do that, I get a
> message "Read/Write permissions failed on USB cradle
> (/dev/usb/tts/1)".  However,
> 
> $ ls -l /dev/usb/tts/1
>   crw-rw----  1 root uucp 188, 1 Dec 31  1969 /dev/usb/tts/1

You say you know this workaround from experience?  Does that mean it
used to work for you?  What has changed?  Your kernel, your palm device,
your gnome-pilot version, the weather??

I haven't heard of this kind of workaround before, to be honest.  I
don't see why the permissions test fails, as I'd have thought it should
pass if you've just pressed the sync button.  I expect someone more
familiar with the usbserial system might be able to shed some light.
This port writable test is intended for a true serial port, not for USB
connections.

What kind of USB problems were you seeing?  If you can't start a sync
because of timeouts, you can probably fix this by increasing the
'timeout' in the applet to the maximum "100 seconds".  If you are seeing
unstable syncs, bombing out and so on, it's most likely a kernel
problem.  As you've probably read, patches used by Fedora kernels have
been blamed for causing a bunch of USB problems.  If you're using a
Fedora kernel, try compiling a kernel from source, without the Fedora
patches.  You can reuse the kernel config from your Fedora kernel, by
copying /boot/config-2.version-whatever to your linux kernel source
directory as /usr/src/linux-2.blah/.config

Matt