pda frustration

[Dan Hensley]

On Thu, 2005-11-03 at 09:46 -0500, jack wallen wrote:
> i've been using linux for over 10 years now. one of the single most
> frustrating aspects of the OS is how difficult it is to get a PDA to
> sync. i'm not sure why but every time i re-install fedora (or red hat
> when i was using that distro), the thing that caused me the most grief
> was the pda. 
> 
> and now - after so many years - i'm working with FC4 thinking "surely
> they've figured it out by now". well, they haven't. syncing a sony clie
> is still a nightmare. i can't get it to work and i'm about to tell
> myself my days with a pda are pretty much over.
> 
> so does anyone know why such amazing developers within the Linux
> community can't seem to make syncing a pda a simple task?

What are you trying to sync with?

I too have a Sony Clie, and I've been successful syncing with it out of
the box, with some caveats.  First, I use jpilot.  Years ago I tried
using gnome-pilot and related, but I gave up because it was so sporadic.
I haven't gone back to try again.  Perhaps I should...

Anyway, with FC3 and FC4 I had to sync as root.  Which is not right or
good.  But I found a simple solution from the archives of I think this
list that allows me to sync quickly and as my regular user.  Note that
FC4 is supposed to allow you to sync out of the box as a regular user,
but the permissions and ownership of the dynamically
available /dev/ttyUSB1 are not correct, and the link takes a very long
time to materialize (~5 seconds for me).

So here's what I did (thanks to the archives for this solution).

As root,
mknod /mnt/pilot c 188 1

Then
chmod a+rw /mnt/pilot

Voila.  Then tell jpilot to use this link, and it all works nicely.

Dan



> 
> just curious.
> 
> and if anyone has had any luck getting an out of box FC4 to sync with a
> sony i'd much appreciate any help.
> 
> -- 
> \||/       jack wallen, jr
>  00        www.monkeypantz.net
>   >        
>  -
>