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

[Matt Davey <mcdavey mrao cam ac uk>]

On Thu, 2006-05-25 at 12:36 -0400, Matt Price wrote:
> tried running this command, but apparently gpilotd.debug is not
> included in the Ubuntu packages (tried installing the -dev packages as
> well, no luck).  running the regular gpilotd with the env variables
> set gave no special bt output, but did append these messages to the
> initial error:
> gpilotd-Message: Found 12ef, 0100
> gpilotd-Message: Using net TRUE
> gpilotd-Message: setting PILOTRATE=9600
> DEV POLL Serial Unix Found data on fd: 19
> DEV RX Unix Serial Bytes: 1
> NET RX: Checking for headerless packet 190
> DEV RX Unix Serial Bytes: 5
> NET RX type=190 txid=0xef len=0xed030302

Cool cool cool. maybe.
Here's a curious thing: '190' in decimal is 'be' in hex.
The first two bytes apparently being read from the file descriptor
therefore spells 'beef'.  This is deeply suspicious.  Check out:
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/D/DEADBEEF.html

This may be coincidence, or it may be a bright red warning light that
ttyUSB is giving us uninitialised memory.  This would be a surprise,
frankly.  Anyone else out there with less unlikely theories?

> > One thing worth trying: if you are running the gnome-pilot panel applet
> > (that shows the enigmatic progress bar on sync, and the 'sync' icon that
> > changes colour) you can right click on the applet to 'pause' the daemon.
[..]
> 
> um, for some reason it wouldn't run just now.

There have been applet bugs reported on debian and ubuntu which I can't
reproduce :(

Another way of accomplishing the same thing is to suspect the gpilotd
process by ctrl-Z at the command line, start the hotsync, and then
resume gpilotd with 'fg'.

If you can get good behaviour with this workaround, this points to
problems with the ttyUSB device creation.  It may be that we need to
handle that on the gnome-pilot side by inserting a small wait between
the USB device notification and the attempt to sync.  We could reuse the
configured 'timeout' value to avoid any GUI changes.

> Thanks much.  Any ideas what I ought to do next while you're enjoying
> your evening (loads of time left in the day here...)?

You could try configuring 'network sync'.  The pilot-link utility
pi-nredir can be used to forward an incoming serial connection to a
remote (or localhost) host.  I think the gp on ubuntu has been patched
so that network sync works, in which case you could get pi-nredir to
listen to ttyUSB, and configure a 'new device' with the gnome-pilot
config applet and set it to netsync.

Matt Davey      You will become one with the Universe next week, incurring
mcdavey mrao cam ac uk 	    the wrath of all the Universe's old boyfriends.