This may help get your Tungsten E working under Linux

A Web search shows lots of users having problems with USB-connected PDA's, under Linux or otherwise. I had been using a serial-connected Palm IIIx and then a IIIxe with JPilot successfully but then bought a Tungsten E and couldn't get it to connect.

Finally I found this very helpful link:

http://pilot-link.org/README.usb

and by following the suggestions in it, was able to get the Tungsten E to work OK under Mandrake Linux 9.2. It works with JPilot and with pilot-xfer (included in the distribution).

Two tips:

1. I found that the port the Tungsten E wants to use is ttyUSB1 (as hinted at in the document linked to above).

2. It's ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY to hit the "hot-sync" button on the HANDHELD before issuing the pilot-xfer command, or "pressing" the sync or backup button in JPilot, if you're using a USB device. Better yet, press the "hot-sync" button on your handheld, then wait three to five seconds, THEN go ahead with the desktop operation.

I found out from further reading that this is because the handheld needs to get a chance to "grab" the USB port before Linux takes it. If you issue the desktop command before pressing the handheld's button, Linux grabs the port, and the handheld is no longer connected. Result: I don't know what to do but reboot. Nothing I tried would fix this short of rebooting.

If pilot-xfer starts giving you messages like "port doesn't exist" and supplying hints as to what to do, it's a good sign you might as well reboot and save yourself some time.

I hope this is useful to others who are exasperated by the difficulty connecting a very nice device via a very complicated mechanism that sometimes doesn't even work.

A footnote to the above. Despite getting the Tungsten E working as described, from time to time I would lose connection and have to reboot to re-establish it.

A lot of searching on the Web for the error message I was seeing in my logs, "device not accepting new address," led me to believe it was a hardware problem, and possibly related to voltage.

So I tried setting "On while recharging" (in the Power settings under Preferences on the Palm) to "Off." I had always had it "On" because I like to use the device when it's hooked up to the charger.

Since setting this preference to "Off," I have not lost connection one time, and furthermore I can click the Palm's hot-sync button either before or after issuing the hot-sync command in JPilot--something impossible before. With pilot-xfer on the command line, if I issue the command before clicking the Palm's hot-sync button, I get the same message as before that the device doesn't exist. But I can then click the Palm's button, re-issue the pilot-xfer command, and it works! This was never possible before.

So changing the Palm's power setting seems to have had a definite effect for the better.

Hope this may help somebody save some time searching as I did (several hours).

If you are using a Tungsten E with Red Hat Fedora Core 1, you should put the following in your /etc/modules.conf file:

options visor vendor=0x0830 product=0x0060

You should also change the permissions on the /dev/usb/ttyUSB1 device node:

chmod 0666 /dev/usb/ttyUSB1

Note that the device node in Red Hat Fedora Core 1 is in /dev/usb, not /dev.

I read your post but did not have any luck with SuSE 9.1 on connecting with my Palm Tungsten. I also was having problems with my USB storage device. After DAYS of trying to get both to work I finally started wondering if somehow the USB on SuSE 9.1 was messed up, and sure enough when I started looking at that I discovered a lot of unhappy campers with nonworking USB devices. I have just stumbled onto this but think that in the final release with the new kernel that something is seriously wrong with USB on SuSE. I am also wondering if other distributions using the latest kernel are having the same problem?

Yes. I read the post but getting the Palm Tungsten T3 to work with Gentoo Linux and kernel 2.6.5 still doesn't seem to work for me. And for me, the /dev/ttyUSB# devices do not exist.

I'm using Gentoo with the 2.6.5 kernel. For me, the /dev/ttyUSBxxx ports never existed, even when connected to my Palm.
My m500 (and Visor Deluxe) shows up under /dev/usb/tts/1, which I symlinked to /dev/pilot, and did a chmod 666 on both
the symlink and the 'tts' dir (only possible when PDA is hot syncing so you'll have to do that as root so regular users
can connect to the port). Before I could get JPilot to work I had to sent the env variable PILOTPORT to "/dev/usb/tts/1".

I had no problems with getting Linux to realize my PDAs were connected, once I had installed the
usbserial module as well as the 'visor' module. Despite the module's name being 'visor', it is for *all USB Palm OS* handhelds.


This HOWTO is excellent: http://www.linuxpda.com/visor/howto/current/. (useful for *any* USB Palm OS pda)

Hope this helps

I don't know if this will help anyone, but generally Gentoo installs with devfs enabled in the kernel, which is why /dev/ttyUSBx does not exist. As is mentioned, /dev/usb/tts/x is used (x stands for an integer), but in my experience these ports are created only when they are needed, i.e. when the PDA is actually syncing and the ports are open. This presents a problem when trying to set up a symbolic link, and worse, when setting permissions on said links (as in, you can't set permissions on a nonexistent device)! I had to hit the hotsync button and in the few seconds when the PDA had the connection open I had to set the permissions on the command line very fast. It was a pain, but it worked. Fortunately the permissions persist if you change them in the sym link as well as in the USB device.

I suppose the easiest way around this is to disable devfs in the kernel. Then you should be able to follow the excellent HOWTO that has been alluded to (which I myself have followed numerous times). Unfortunately, I never was able to get gpilot to work with my PDA (Visor Edge) and so couldn't use Evolution. Does Evolution work with KPilot, or only with pilot-link? If so, how I give pilot-link my user name from the PDA? Just wondering...

In replies above, it refers to the /etc/modules.conf file in Fedora Core 1. This is one of the things that has changed in Fedora Core 2. The file is now called /etc/modprobe.conf.