I’m Tired and My Palm Don’t Love Me

I almost fainted yesterday.

I took my T3 Palm out of my pocket and pressed address book. The screen was blank.

I gulped.

I slid open the screen which is set to fire up the Palm. Nothing.

I stopped breathing.

Finally, I pressed the power button.

Nothing. Nada. A sausage not.

My Palm’s battery had decided that it had had enough for the day.

The reason that this is so bothersome is that as most Palm users will tell you – a flat battery is the equivalent to carrying out a hard reset. All data on the Palm is lost. The real annoyance is that I haven’t been able to back up my Palm because I’ve been using Linux. The experience is becoming a painful one to say the least. Simple things like Synchronising my Palm is awkward and difficult because the closest I have got to a synchronisation is the following error message in KPilot:

Pilot device /dev/ttyUSB1 is not read-write.

Of course – being a DOS/Windows native, the obvious answer hadn’t occurred to me, which I found on the SuSE Linux Forums

It turns out that the error message is telling me exactly what I need to know. The USB device doesn’t have read/write permissions. Well, not when I’m a standard user anyway.

So running chmod 04666 /dev/ttyUSB1 (USB1 is the port I happen to be using) as root admin will make the USB port read/writeable for all users. Hooray!

The only drawback is that now I finally have the thing synchronising – I need to go back to Windows to be able to (hopefully) restore my settings Before Linuxing it. I’ll see how that goes…