The first thing you have to understand is that the Palm does not
show up as a USB device until you press the sync button. When you
start the sync on the Palm, there are two USB serial ports created.
I don't know why it shows up as 2 devices - you would have to ask Palm.
Now, there is a problem with it showing up as 2 serial ports - some
Palm devices use the first port to sync, and some use the second.
The udev rules that create the pilot symlink work fine with one
type, but not the other. I don't remember if the Treo uses the first
port, or the second port. Eventually someone is going to have to
write a set of udev rules that create the correct symlink based on
the product ID of the palm. I think the old hotplug script did
something like that.
To make matter slightly more complicated, the current console.perms
rules do not change the owner on the serial ports, but do change the
permissions on the port pointed to by the pilot symlink. So if the
symlink points to the wrong port, then you can not access it as a
user, unless you belong to the uucp group. Otherwise you could use
/dev/ttyUSB0 or /dev/ttyUSB1 instead of /dev/pilot.
Mikkel
Thanks Mikkel for the info. However, despite all this, there are still individuals out there that have some degree of success with their Palm Devices. In addition, I can still get my Palm device to work perfectly under Windows. I don't understand why there doesn't seem to be the will for anyone to get these devices working correctly and consistently under Linux with each successive release of Fedora. It's almost a crap shoot with each release of Fedora - sometimes the Palm devices work and sometimes they don't. In any case, I am not sure that the issue is with the Palm company - after all they seem to work well with the software that is written for Windows. It's frustrating because I am a great fan of Fedora but at the same time, I need my device to work reliably and consistently and these difficulties seems to be a show stopper to where I am forced to use Windows for my Palm Treo 680.
