LifeDrive with a Linux desktop

The LifeDrive:
Currently the LifeDrive is Palm's attempt to be relevant in the emerging portable media player market(PMP). It wokrs pretty well as a PDA and does a good job as a PMP. I recently purchased one and thought this would be a good place to comment on it's useabilty with Linux.

The Sync:

All hail the networksync feature of pilot-link. Without I would never have gotten the LifeDrive to sync. It ships with a usb cradle and this is the source of the problems. On most modern Linux distros you have dbus/hotplug enabled and the LifeDrive rports it self as a USB device as soon as you plug it in to teh cradle. This is good for drive mode, bad for hotsyncing. When you press teh hotsync butto the Lifedrive it resets the USB connection causing the /devpilot(/dev/tts/USB1 or /dev/ttyUSB1) to reset and breaking the connection. I have not found a awy around this yet. Luckly the Lifedrive comes with both Bluetooth and wifi. The device can sync over the wifi connection.


To setup Lifedrive for the network sync follow teh instruciton given in the Network Hotsync Document on the right side of the page. Be sure you have pilot-link installed, to test the connection use 'pilot-xfer -p net:any -l'. You should see pilot-xfer listening on port net:any message. Press teh hotsync button and watchit go, you should see a list of items from the Lifedrive.



The Desktop-

I use J-pilot for my desktop software. The LifeDrive supports all the features of the J-pilot. However, J-pilot does NOT support all of the LifeDrive features. Many of these features can be duplicated by using Drive Mode.



Drive Mode-

When the LifeDrive is set to Drive Mode it reports it self as 3.5 gig usb drive and allows you to move files back and forth with Nautilus and I would assume Konquer with out problem. Just be sure to turn off drive Mode be for unpluging the LifeDrive

pilot-xfer -l failing on FC4

First of all, great work on this project! I really appreciate all the work you guys have done!

Unfortunately, once I upgraded to FC4, I lost all capability to sync with my Zire 72 over USB. This used to work perfectly fine in FC3.

I'll start from the beginning to make sure I'm not missing something completely obvious. I removed all /etc/udev/rules.d and /etc/udev/permissions.d changes. Starting from scratch, I'm trying to get a simple pilot-xfer -l working and am having difficulty.

When I turn on my Palm and press HotSync, I get the following in /var/log/messages:

Jul 18 00:11:46 localhost kernel: usb 1-4.4: new full speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 15
Jul 18 00:11:46 localhost kernel: visor 1-4.4:1.0: Handspring Visor / Palm OS converter detected
Jul 18 00:11:46 localhost kernel: usb 1-4.4: Handspring Visor / Palm OS converter now attached to ttyUSB0
Jul 18 00:11:46 localhost kernel: usb 1-4.4: Handspring Visor / Palm OS converter now attached to ttyUSB1

So far so good. And the devices /dev/ttyUSB0 and /dev/ttyUSB1 appear after about 6 seconds:

[root@markroth-pc mroth]# ls -l /dev/ttyUSB*
crw-rw---- 1 root uucp 188, 0 Jul 18 00:11 /dev/ttyUSB0
crw-rw---- 1 root uucp 188, 1 Jul 18 00:11 /dev/ttyUSB1

When I do pilot-xfer -p /dev/ttyUSB1 -l, I get:

Listening for incoming connection on /dev/ttyUSB1...

It pauses there and never returns. (I'm using pilot-link-0.12.0-0.pre4.2 on FC4).

Using strace, I've managed to see that some data is being exchanged, but I don't know enough about the protocol to know whether this is good data or not:

write(1, " Listening for incoming connec"..., 56 Listening for incoming connection on /dev/ttyUSB1... ) = 56
ioctl(3, SNDCTL_TMR_TIMEBASE or TCGETS, {B9600 -opost -isig -icanon -echo ...}) = 0
ioctl(3, SNDCTL_TMR_STOP or TCSETSW, {B9600 -opost -isig -icanon -echo ...}) = 0select(4, [3], NULL, NULL, NULL) = 1 (in [3])
select(4, [3], NULL, NULL, NULL) = 1 (in [3])
read(3, "\1", 1) = 1
select(4, [3], NULL, NULL, NULL) = 1 (in [3])
read(3, "\377\0\0\0\26", 6) = 5
select(4, [3], NULL, NULL, NULL

It just pauses here until the Pilot gives up.

Can anyone help suggest where I can proceed from here? I'd really like to get this working.

Thanks much!
- Mark