Hotsync Palm Centro on Ubuntu Gutsy

Here’s a brief howto on setting up a Palm Centro to work on Ubunty 7.10 “Gutsy Gibbon”.

ALL THIS CRAP DOESN’T MATTER. IT’S WRONG, AND ACTUALLY GETS IN YOUR WAY IF YOU USE ANYTHING OTHER THAN JPILOT. To get your pilot-link, jpilot, kpilot, or whatever stuff working, just point the source to “usb:” rather than /dev/pilot or whatever. Doing “usb:” works perfectly on everything the first time, and no hours of mucking around is necessary. So on Ubuntu: plug it in. Make sure it’s looking at your “usb:” port and not /dev/pilot. Press hotsync. Enjoy. That’s what I get for being an old-school UNIX geek. I thought this was supposed to be difficult.

1. Disconnect your Palm Centro from the computer if it is already connected.
2. Open a terminal window.
3. In that terminal window, type “sudo bash”. We’re becoming the root user for the rest of this session.
4. Type “cd /etc/udev/rules.d”
5. Open the file “60-symlinks.rules” in your favorite text editor (default, I think, is pico on ubuntu, which works fine).
6. Comment out — that is, put the # character at the start of the line — the following lines:

    KERNEL=="ttyUSB*", ATTRS{product}=="Palm Handheld*|Handspring *|palmOne Handheld", \ SYMLINK+="pilot"

   That section should now look like this:

   # KERNEL=="ttyUSB*", ATTRS{product}=="Palm Handheld*|Handspring *|palmOne Handheld", \ # SYMLINK+="pilot" 

7. Save and close the file.
8. Edit the existing version of, or create a new file named “10-custom.rules”
9. In that file, include these two lines (it’s actually one line, separated by the “\” character, but I did it so it’s easy to copy and paste):

   BUS=="usb", SYSFS{product}=="*[vVisor]*", KERNEL=="ttyUSB[13579]", NAME="pilot",\ GROUP="dialout", MODE="0660"

10. Save and close the file.
11. Now edit /etc/modules, and add the word “visor” to the last line of the file.
12. Type “modprobe visor” (or reboot and skip the next step, too…).
13. Type “/etc/init.d/udev restart”.
14. Fire up your Pilot sync application (I use jpilot), re-attach your Centro, press Hotsync on the Centro and you’re off!

Of course, I had to press the hotsync button in Jpilot after pressing the hotsync button on the Centro cable. But it backed up all my important info, which is what I was looking for!

Additional note: you may have some issues using jpilot if you try to point to /dev/pilot or /dev/ttyUSB* for your input port. If you go to File – Preferences and modify “Settings” to “usb:” (no quotes), it will see the connection very consistently and run very quickly.

Additional update: Apparently, all my hijinks above are completely unnecessary if you just do the last bit: change your connection setting in jpilot to “usb:”… it works out of the box!