Palm 515 and Evolution

[raven5]

Notes on enabling Palm Pilot to communicate with Evolution:

Ensure Evolution was built with USE flag pda. This builds gpilot conduits in.

Make sure support for usb is included in your kernel. I am using 2.4.

# make menuconfig

<*> Support for USB
[*] USB verbose debug messages
--- Miscellaneous USB options
[*] Preliminary USB device filesystem
--- USB Host Controller Drivers
<*> EHCI HCD (USB 2.0) support (EXPERIMENTAL)
<*> UHCI Alternate Driver (JE) support
<*> OHCI (Compaq, iMacs, OPTi, SiS, ALi, ...) support

<*> USB Serial Converter support
[*] USB Generic Serial Driver
<*> USB Handspring Visor / Palm m50x / Sony Clie Driver


If you do not have lsusb:

# emerge lsusb

Once your kernel has usb support. Run lsusb utils to see that Palm appears on the bus when hot sync button is pressed.

Output from lsusb will look something like this:

root@cambridge init.d # lsusb

Bus 003 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 003 Device 002: ID 059b:0033 Iomega Corp.
Bus 003 Device 003: ID 0556:0001 Asahi Kasei Microsystems Co., Ltd
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 002 Device 007: ID 0830:0003 Palm, Inc. Palm M515
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 0781:8185 SanDisk Corp.

Press Hot sync button, run dmesg and grep for verbiage on Palm:

# dmesg

Manufacturer: Palm, Inc.
Product: Palm Handheld
SerialNumber: 00887T674
usbserial.c: Handspring Visor / Treo / Palm 4.0 / Cli\uffff 4.x converter detected
usbserial.c: Handspring Visor / Treo / Palm 4.0 / Cli\uffff 4.x converter now attached to ttyUSB0 (or usb/tts/0 for devfs)
usbserial.c: Handspring Visor / Treo / Palm 4.0 / Cli\uffff 4.x converter now attached to ttyUSB1 (or usb/tts/1 for devfs)
usb.c: serial driver claimed interface e9d7e640
usb.c: kusbd: /sbin/hotplug add 19
usb.c: kusbd policy returned 0xfffffffe

If you wait too long it will disconnect.

Note device node name. Use the second one. In my case it was usb/tts/1.

Run simple check that kernel can communcate with Palm.

Press hot sync and run pilot command using device from above:

# pilot-xfer --port /dev/usb/tts/1 --list

This should cause text from your palm to scrawl across screen.

Now that you know you can communicate with palm, start Evolution.

Under Tools/Pilot Settings/Devices, use device /dev/usb/tts/1 ( in my case ) as above to do the set up.