Thanks for the helpful responses. My first 2.6.17.6 kernel did have some config issues which prevented me from seeing the normal boot messages. I went through almost every option now and think I have something decent. I also did more experiments with gpilotd and pilot-link.
gpilotd now does a full sync reliably. But only if I start it by manually from the command line. After the sync is completed, it seems to hang, and I cannot perform another sync. If I then kill gpilotd and start it again manually, I can then perform another sync. Perhaps related to this, /dev/ttyUSB0 and /dev/ttyUSB1 still exist long after my palm device has disconnected from the bus as long as gpilotd is running. As soon as I kill gpilotd, those entries disappear. I have setup udev to create a /dev/pilot symlink to /dev/ttyUSB1. I reconfigured gpilotd to use /dev/pilot instead of /dev/ttyUSB1 directly and saw the same behavior. I also tried using pilot-link. pilot-link will not talk to my palm device at all. It hangs at the message "please press the hotsync button now" when I've already pressed the hotsync button before starting pilot-link. If I wait until starting pilot-link to press the hotsync button, it complains that /dev/pilot does not exist. That's the human timing issue I was talking about. I hadn't ever used gnome-pilot under Debian so I couldn't comment on anything there. I also tried jpilot and got a similar result as pilot-link. I pressed the hotsync button on the cradle, then pressed a sync button on its GUI and it said "press the hotsync button". Here are some messages: J-Pilot: sync PID = 8469 J-Pilot: press the hotsync button on the cradle or "kill 8469" pi_accept: Connection timed out pi_accept Illegal seek Exiting with status SYNC_ERROR_PI_ACCEPT Finished J-Pilot: sync PID = 8497 J-Pilot: press the hotsync button on the cradle or "kill 8497" J-Pilot: sync PID = 8497 J-Pilot: press the hotsync button on the cradle or "kill 8497" J-Pilot: sync PID = 8497 J-Pilot: press the hotsync button on the cradle or "kill 8497" J-Pilot: sync PID = 8497 J-Pilot: press the hotsync button on the cradle or "kill 8497" J-Pilot: sync PID = 8497 J-Pilot: press the hotsync button on the cradle or "kill 8497" dlp_ReadSysInfo error Exiting with status SYNC_ERROR_PI_CONNECT Finished So at this point I have a usable workaround by running gpilotd manually with kernel 2.6.17.6. I'm not sure what to make of the fact that palm syncing app seems to be broken in different ways. Maybe something subtle has changed in the USB subsystem that is causing them to flake out? -Rob -- Robert W. Brewer -- Pb syncing treo 650 on dapper drake https://launchpad.net/bugs/38574 -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs