Re: Palm Life Drive and Evolution Pilot

[Matt Davey <mcdavey mrao cam ac uk>]

Hi Andrew,

On Thu, 2008-06-12 at 08:09 +1000, Andrew Greig wrote:
> On Wed, 2008-06-11 at 10:45 +0100, Matt Davey wrote:
> > Hi Andrew,
> > 
> > On Wed, 2008-06-11 at 10:38 +1000, Andrew Greig wrote:
> > > Hi all,
> > > 
> > > My struggle to get a Palm Life Drive working under libusb has been going
> > > on for over a year.  I have resigned myself to the fact that I will have
> > > to continue to work with visor because even if it is slower it works for
> > > me.
> > > 
> > > The problem now is to figure out why gnome-pilot will not sync with the
> > > Palm Life Drive, when Jpilot and Pilot-xfer both work under visor.
> > 
> > One workaround, just to get things going, is to configure network
> > hotsync.  This should avoid the various known problems with the
> > lifedrive and usb syncing.
[cut]
> 
> (gpilotd:9220): gpilotd-WARNING **: Could not get usb vendor ID from
> hal: No pro
> perty usb_device.vendor_id on device with
> id /org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/usb_de
> vice_ffffffff_ffffffff_noserial_serial_usb_0

Aha.  gnome-pilot 2.0.16 uses an old HAL API that has been removed in
recently shipping versions.  You have two options:
     1. suspend hald before starting gpilotd.  gpilotd will then fall
        back to polling sysfs for usb information instead of using HAL.
     2. (better) patch gnome-pilot and rebuild from source.  I'm
        attaching a patch (with thanks to Frederic Crozat).

Let us know how you get on,

Matt

Matt Davey        Pornography: "It's not the teat, it's the tumidity"
mcdavey mrao cam ac uk                              -- William Safire	

diff -p -up gnome-pilot-2.0.16/gpilotd/gpilotd.c.hal gnome-pilot-2.0.16/gpilotd/gpilotd.c
--- gnome-pilot-2.0.16/gpilotd/gpilotd.c.hal	2008-03-21 18:46:09.000000000 +0100
+++ gnome-pilot-2.0.16/gpilotd/gpilotd.c	2008-03-21 18:56:02.000000000 +0100
@@ -1079,7 +1079,7 @@ static void
 hal_device_added (LibHalContext *ctx, const char *udi)
 {
 	gboolean visor_net = FALSE;
-	char *bus, *match_str;
+	char *platform, *match_str;
 	int vendor_id, product_id, i;
 	GPilotDevice *device;
 	DBusError error;
@@ -1090,14 +1090,14 @@ hal_device_added (LibHalContext *ctx, co
 
 	load_devices_xml ();
 
-	/* HAL match rule: we look for info.bus == 'usb_device'
+	/* HAL match rule: we look for pda.platform == 'palm'
 	 * and then try to match the usb_device.product_id and usb_device.vendor_id
 	 * against the list in devices.xml.
 	 */
-	if (!(bus = libhal_device_get_property_string (hal_ctx, udi, "info.bus", NULL)))
+	if (!(platform = libhal_device_get_property_string (hal_ctx, udi, "pda.platform", NULL)))
 		return;
-	if (strcmp (bus, "usb_device") != 0) {
-		libhal_free_string (bus);
+	if (strcmp (platform, "palm") != 0) {
+		libhal_free_string (platform);
 		return;
 	}