Solving pilot-xfer sync problem on Ubuntu Jaunty / Linux Mint 7

I use pilot-xfer (part of the pilot-link package) to back up the data on my Palm Centro, and occasionally to install files on the Centro. It’s always worked fine on Linux Mint 6. The only thing I needed to do before running pilot-xfer was load the visor kernel module using this command:

sudo modprobe visor

But when I switched to a different laptop running Linux Mint 7, pilot-xfer never seemed to be able to connect with the Centro for the second and subsequent attempts after a reboot. Some poking around revealed that the problem is apparently due to the visor module setting up an incorrect symbolic link for the device /dev/pilot. Normally, after you connect the Centro to the computer with a USB cable and press the hotsync button, /dev/pilot should become a symlink that points to ttyUSB1. But I was seeing it point to ttyUSB0, which is the wrong device file for the Centro.

I couldn’t find an elegant way to fix the problem, so I was forced to come up with a brute force method: before connecting the Centro with the USB cable, remove the visor module and the device symlink:

sudo rmmod visor
sudo rm /dev/pilot

Then after connecting the Centro, load the visor module again:

sudo modprobe visor

Note 1: Immediately after you load the visor module, /dev/pilot will point to ttyUSB0. That’s OK. After you press the hotsync button, the visor module should change the symlink to point to ttyUSB1. If it doesn’t, you’ll have to use the brute force “unplug and unload” method I described above.

Note 2: You should always press the hotsync button on the Centro before running pilot-xfer.

Note 3: You can eliminate the need to use the -p option with pilot-xfer by setting the environment variable PILOTPORT to /dev/pilot. Putting this line in your ~/.bashrc (if your shell is bash) will do the trick:

export PILOTPORT=/dev/pilot