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[sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>]

I have a Franklin Handspring Visor Palm II PDA with USB cradle (that 
optionally has a serial cradle.  A visitor brought over his similar PDA 
and explained that you can use it in linux.  So I spent an hour figuring 
out how to type in with stylus one address, one todo, and three scheduled 
events and decided I need to learn to type it on a real keyboard.  He said 
there is linux software for this, so I searched on Palm Handspring linux.

I just downloaded about 1MB of pilot-link-0.12.0-pre4.7.bz2 source code.

About 5-10 min of bunzip2, tar -xvf,./configure, make, make install 
gave me a lot of files in  /usr/local:

./bin - about 2MB, create, transform, move various files to/from PDA
(It supports many features I don't have, such as voice recording and 
photos).

./lib - 650K of two .so files, and 1.3MB of .a and 2K of .la

./include - 200K of .h files

Can I safely delete the .*a and .h files if I won't be using them to 
compile anything else?

./share/pilot-link - 3 little files

./man/man1/  84K of useful looking documentation

I used the SW81 glibc, gcc and binutils.  'as' was quite busy for a few 
minutes.

Would anyone like a Slackware package of this (requires glibc 2.2.5 and I 
have no idea yet if it works)?

jpilot and kpilot appear to be gui frontends for pilot-link.

You can also compile USB support into 'coldsync'.

Handspring offers an optional serial cradle, but I have USB cradle.
For serial connection to Com1:
ln -s /dev/ttyS0 /dev/pilot

I found 'A Trio of Tips for the Handspring Visor' for linux
http://alllinuxdevices.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2000-12-27-001-03-PS-HH
which refers to a Handspring Visor USB Mini-HOWTO at 
http://www.calvin.edu/~rvbijl39/visor/visor.html

I need to compile in usb-serial and Visor support, and use kernel 2.2.18 
or later to get usb-serial support.  (This is not mass storage but some 
USB emulation of serial).

I think David compiled usb-serial for one of his 2.4.31 kernels, probably 
not Visor.

Steven provides both modules for 2.2.26, thanks! Do I need the 'big' 
kernel to use them?

insmod usbcore, uhci or ohci, usb-serial, visor (anything else?)

mknod /dev/ttyUSB0 c 188 0
mknod /dev/ttyUSB1 c 188 1

ln -s /dev/ttyUSB1 /dev/pilot
(What does ttyUSB0 do?)

Press sync button on cradle before starting pilot software.  (Similar to 
turning the USB camera on and to PC mode before insmodding usb-storage?).

They also suggest Wordsmith, by Blue Nomad, a Palm wordprocessor, which 
produces .pdb files that you can convert with their conversion program to 
.rtf files, shareware $30, free for use as memo pad or e-text viewer.  It 
requires Palm OS III.  Might it work as a small wordprocessor without 
Palm?  2.3MB, available for Redhat Linux 6.0 and later.

It looks to me like just a conversion program, rtf to pdb, that requires
a wordprocessor.

sindi