Re: gnome-pilot can't see my palm V (jpilot can)

[Matt Davey <mcdavey mrao cam ac uk>]

> Hi,
> 
> I've been happily running gnome-pilot & evolution on debian sid for a
> while, and my palm v has synced pretty well.  Unfortunately my
> ocmputer died & I upgraded both hard and software, and I'm now running
> Ubuntu dapper (gnome-pilot 2.0.13-0ubuntu16 is the package version).
> My palm is an old Palm V which connects over USB using a Belkin
> Serial-to-USB cable.  

First, a couple of quick questions as to your setup.  How do you
configure your device in gnome-pilot?  I'm presuming that if you
have a serial-to-usb cable you have to add a specific usb 
vendor/device id to gnome-pilot's devices.xml file that matches
whatever the palmV appears as?  

There have been some changes to gp on Ubuntu dapper, because dapper
has removed the usbfs filesystem at /proc/bus/usb, which gp
relied on.  You may have a version that uses HAL callbacks to spot
when hardware appears, in which case we should definitely try
to debug it!

> dmesg shows that the device is recognized, the handspring/visor module
> is loaded, and /dev/ttyUSB0 is created.  Jpilot, and I htink also
> kpilot, can connect quite happily (kpilot wants to erase all my data,
> but jpilot syncs perfectly).  I'd really like to use gnome-pilot,
> though, but unfortunately gpilotd dies when I press the hotsync
> button with a gtk-warning "cannot open display".

I'd love to know exactly where that crash happens.  Do you get a
'bug-buddy' dialog when it crashes?  If so, you should be able to
get a stack trace.  Alternatively, try starting gpilotd with a
debugger:
	killall gpilotd
	gdb /usr/libexec/gpilotd
When it crashes, type 'bt' to get a 'backtrace'.
If you can send the complete gpilotd output, from when it starts
to the backtrace, that would be great.  This output will also
confirm which version of pilot-link you're using.

 [that's actually on a
> good run; sometimes it just sits there repeating:
> 
> (gnome-pilot:11574): gpilotd-WARNING **: pi_accept_to: Connection
> timed out
> 
> (gnome-pilot:11574): gpilotd-WARNING **: pi_accept_to: timeout was 2
> secs
> gpilotd-Message: setting PILOTRATE=9600
> 
> anyway I'm tyring to figure out why jpilot can connect when gpilotd
> can't.  Can you folks point me in the right direction?

The other simple thing worth trying (with pilot-link 0.11.8) is
increasing the 'timeout' value configured in gnome-pilot.  At the
moment you have it at '2'; try increasing it to 100 (pilot-link
0.11.8 interprets the number as milliseconds, not seconds.  It'll
be fixed in 0.12.0).

Would you be interesting in trying to compile from a tarball?
If so, I can give you some pointers to the most recent gnome-pilot
development source.

Hang in there, we'll get you going.

Matt