Palm III xe

[Rob Wright <debianrob@poncacity.net>]

Greetings,

I'm new to Debian, so please forgive me if this has been beaten to death. 
Through Red Hat, Fedora, and OpenSuSE I've not been able to get my old
Palm IIIxe to connect and ultimately sync. This is something I was really 
hoping to be able to do with Debian but I'm beginning to wonder if it's 
possible at all. 

I have the original serial syncing cradle, with an USB adapter. Using the 
serial connection and KPilot, the Palm acts like it's talking to kpilot and 
tells me it's connecting and cleaning up but it's unable to sync, which is 
farther than I've gone with anything else. That's using the configuration 
wizard in kpilot, and autodetecting. Using the usb adapter gets me no 
connection at all and the "unable to connect" message on the Palm itself. 

I've told kpilot to use /dev/ttyS0 directly, and I've linked /dev/ttyS0 
to /dev/pilot and tried it that way with no luck.

I've found TONS of information through Google over the last year or two, but 
nothing that actually works. Is it possible to sync up this thing with Linux 
or have I been tilting at windmills? Assuming it is possible (I believe that 
ultimately anything with Linux is possible given enough effort) can someone 
point me to a dangerously simple and clear cut method for doing so?

I have Etch installed, as of last Thursday. 

Thanks for any help, information, brickbats.

Rob Wright
debianrob@poncacity.net