Howto Sync your Palm Pilot with gpilot in Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake)

Problem

Many users have found that the gpilot daemon is not working for their Palm devices in Ubuntu 6.06. This is caused by the daemon expecting /proc/bus/usb/ to exist, which at the time of writing (pre Ubuntu 6.06 release - have not tested for fix... anyone?) was not occuring on Ubuntu 6.06.

Solution

Thanks to qball and cruss who contributed to this solution in this thread on the forums - http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=128603

This solution has been proven on Tungsten E2 and Treo 650, and should work on most other models.

Open for editing the filesystems table using this command

gksudo gedit /etc/fstab

and add this line at the end of the document

/proc/bus/usb/  /proc/bus/usb/  usbfs    none        0       0

If the gpilotd applet is not running you can run the command

sudo mount /proc/bus/usb/

If you already have the gpilot applet on your gnome panel, you simply have to restart the daemon using the applet and syncing should roar into life when you hit the hotsync button.

If you have problems you may need to restart the daemon using the applet before trying again.

Note: I am now using /dev/pilot as my device setting rather than /dev/ttyUSB1 that I used in Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy Badger).

If you do not have the applet on your panel, right-click on the panel and choose 'Add to Panel'. Select the item named 'Pilot Applet' and click on the 'Add' button. Use the applet to restart the daemon. Then, you should be ready to go and hit the hotsync button of your Palm cradle.

If hotsync works but the applet is locking up (your device will display "Identifying User" for too long) then I would suggest removing it from the panel and killing the process. This can be achieve by entering the following command in a terminal:

killall gpilotd

Then run the gpilot program from your terminal:

gpilotd

Running gpilot in a terminal is a handy way to diagnose the daemon if you are experiencing problems.

Make sure the base folder, where you want to back up your files, already exists. Then, perform a hotsync. You may need to use the terminal for all your future hotsyncs until you restart your computer.

Once you restart your computer, add the 'Pilot Applet' to your panel and once it turns black and white you are ready to hotsync at anytime.

CategoryPDA