Re: Handspring Visor & Debian

[Rob Tillotson <robt@debian.org>]

Gareth Bowker <tgb96@aber.ac.uk> writes:

> Having had my Palm IIIc go missing over the New Year, I'm looking into
> replacing it and was wondering about the Visor from Handspring. I
> noticed that the 2.4 kernel has some support for it. Does anyone have
> any experience setting one up under Linux and getting it to work with
> gpilotd and so forth?

I haven't tried anything but pilot-link, but my shiny new Visor Prism
works perfectly with my Debian (unstable/2.2.18 kernel) box.  A 2.4
kernel doesn't appear to be necessary, as long as you have a 2.2.x
kernel with USB backport in it (I think this is included in the main
2.2.18 tree, since I don't remember ever applying a patch for it).

It's pretty simple to use, really -- the Visor has two USB endpoints
which appear on the bus when you push the HotSync button.  With the
Prism, the relevant one appears as /dev/ttyUSB1 (modulo any other USB
serial devices you might have), and you just use that port with
whatever desktop software you might have.

One thing that may take a bit of getting used to: the port doesn't
exist until a second or two after you press the HotSync button on the
Visor, so the desktop software can't wait for a connection.  You have
to start the sync on the palmtop end first, wait a little bit for it
for the kernel to do its USB stuff, and then run the desktop software.
I'm not sure how gpilotd et. al. would handle this; perhaps they are
capable of watching the USB stuff to see when the Visor connects.

For the most par, it seems to work perfectly.  The only problem I have
had is that in one case, I started transferring a group of databases
to the Visor then changed my mind and interrupted it, and the kernel
USB stack was left in a state where it no longer worked.  Other than
that, it works exactly like a serial-connected Palm, but faster.

(Oh, it works with PPP too.  Rather neat... too bad Handspring left
out the "stay on while in cradle" option, I hope someone has done a
hack to do it.)

--Rob

-- 
Rob Tillotson  N9MTB  <robt@debian.org>