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The Handspring Visor, Wireless Swiss Army Knife !!

Submitted by sandip on Thu, 06/10/2004 - 01:00

My Handspring Visor Deluxe finally died after a long spiel of 3 years getting trashed around. I also used it as my cell phone with the Springboard module, Sprint Wireless Digital Link attached to it. So, I was cut off from the World without my Wireless swiss army knife!! I had to act fast... Got a sweet deal on eBay and upgraded myself to a brand new "Visor Neo"! The seller aparently found it after a year in hiding, when the wife bought it, opened it up... read through the manual and decided that it was too dificult to set it up and use it, so put it aside. Lucky Me!!

I finally got the Visor today and have re-synced it with slightly outdated data. If you have a PDA which runs on Palm OS and want to sync to a linux setup, Pilot-Link is what you need. It is a command line tool for synchronizing, backing up, restoring, installing etc... It should come standard with the latest linux distros and is a breeze to setup. If you need a GUI interface, J-Pilot is a graphical desktop organizer application similar in functionality to Palm Desktop. If you are in an office environment and need to synchronize data between several handhelds the Gnome-Pilot may be the way to go. It runs a daemon both for the single pilot user, but also for office use, where many pilots and many people are involved. The pilot-link tools are a robust library and a series of conduits for moving information between your workstation and your Visor and are required for both, J-Pilot and Gnome-Pilot.

Tip 1: I sync using my USB cradle that comes standard with the visor and thus created a symlink to one of the USB ports as below before syncing (so it is easily remembered):

#ln -s /dev/ttyUSB1 /dev/pilot

Tip 2: To start the GNOME Pilot configuration tool, double-click on the Palm Pilot icon in the GNOME Control Center, or enter the command `gpilotd-control-applet`. You can also start the configuration tool by clicking on the GNOME Pilot applet in your panel.

Also check out the visor info at zorg.org for other related links.

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Synching Handspring Visor Palm on Fedora Core 5

Submitted by sandip on Sun, 06/04/2006 - 11:14.

On FC5, instead of setting up the symlink as mentioned above, will need to create a udev rule as below prior to running the sync:

# cat <<EOF > /etc/udev/rules.d/10-visor.rules
### udev rule to create /dev/pilot for handspring ###
KERNEL="ttyUSB1",SYMLINK="pilot"
EOF

Here is how I did a first time sync after creating the above rule for udev:

  1. Navigate to "System -> Preferences -> More Preferences -> PalmOS Devices".
  2. Setup the Pilot settings as prompted.
    Note: You may need to know your current "UserName" and "ID".
  3. Setup up the conduit settings as preferred and press the HotSync button on the Visor.
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