| Latest News |
| 09/06/2001 |
| OK, I think the site will finally be stable. It is now moved back to sf.net with no banners, etc. The free webhost where it was located suddenly went away one day. Sorry for the inconvenience |
| 11/13/2000 |
| An apparently long-standing bug in the visor driver has been squashed. It pertains to usage with an OHCI-based usb controller, and has allowed some users to now use the Visor consistently for the first time. The patch can be retrieved from here. Nice work, Greg! |
| 11/09/2000 |
| The new eyemodule patch[Broken link] seems to work well for the Prism. My eyemodule is usable once again. |
| 11/08/2000 |
| A new eyemodule patch[Broken link] is supposed to become available this afternoon. The one released early last week was pulled since it caused more serious problems on a small percentage of Visors. Let us hope that the eyemodule will now be usable on the latest Visor models. |
| 11/07/2000 |
| There is at least one report that the Visor Platinum also uses /dev/ttyUSB1 when negotiating a PPP connection. Rather, it is using the second of two USB bulk endpoint pairs ;) But, you get the idea. |
| 11/04/2000 |
| The Prism changed a few things with regard to USB. This is due to the upgrade to PalmOS 3.5.2 and Handspring's mods to it. Click here for a small howto on setting up a PPP link over USB to Linux with the Prism. One major difference is that the Prism seems to like using /dev/ttyUSB1 instead of ttyUSB0 for the PPP connection. Do note, however, that no changes to USB setup are required to use the Prism with Linux for hotsyncing. The USB device IDs are the same as with the Deluxe and Std models, so the Linux driver finds the Prism just fine. |
| 10/18/2000 |
| I just got my Visor Prism in yesterday. LinkUSB seems to be unnecessary with this Visor, so I recommend NOT installing it. They have a Direct Serial/USB option that seems to be workable. I am still trying to setup a PPP session over USB with it. So far it is either locking the Visor (Reset dialog appears). Or simply dying on the Linux side. In one case, the Prism locked in one of those repetitive flash and reset modes. I may need to do some cleanup since I restored all I had on the Visor to it, including some possibly conflicting libraries. |
| 10/09/2000 |
| I managed to survive a move from Houston to Austin last week, so excuse this page getting dated. It has been hectic and expensive lately ;) |
| Ryan VanderBijl has written an eyemodule image extraction program in C called em_extract. |
| Also, the howto has been translated into Russian! You can find it here. |
| 10/07/2000 |
| Quoting Greg, "Sorry, but (linux-2.4.0-)test9 broke a bunch of USB drivers including all of the usb-serial drivers. The patch to fix this is available on the linux-usb patch page: http://sourceforge.net/patch/?group_id=3581. Specifically you want the patch at http://sourceforge.net/patch/?func=detailpatch&patch_id=101793&group_id=3581 to fix this." |
| 8/19/2000 |
| Well, I am back from LWE. Of course you all know by now about the Agenda, right? This device boasts a nice processor and is not a PalmOS compatible. When I asked one of the designers about USB, he reminded me that there are USB to serial converters out there ;) |
| Also, the PocketLinux guys seem to have a nice product. Both were unveiled at the show. Hopefully this will aid in development of a stable linux kernel that can be loaded on our favorite PalmOS compatible Visor in some indirect way. If someone is aware of such, please let me know. |
| Follow this link for some discussion regarding using USB to download a visor rom for POSE. If anyone has information on doing this under Linux, please email me so I can post it here. |
| 8/12/2000 |
| I will be wandering around the Linux World Expo for the next few days. I hope to meet the maintainer of pilot-link and some other linux gurus. I would say look for the guy with the blue Visor, but those seem to be really popular ;) |
| 8/11/2000 |
| There was an inaugural meeting of the Palm Users Group for the Houston Area League of PC Users (HAL-PC) today in Houston. James Hromadka of VisorCentral was there showing off some of the available Springboard modules and accessories. It was nice to meet you, James! Follow this link to the story, complete with a picture I took using the eyemodule ;) |
| 8/07/2000 |
| Yes, I changed the site layout again. There is some new content, but a lot of the cruft is still in place as well. |
| 8/05/2000 |
| There is a short survey to see what is the most popular among 5 hotsyncing packages useable with Linux. Visit the sourceforge page to participate. |
| Check your Visor! A memory component issue has been discovered that affects some palms and Visors. |
| Visit Handspring: Product Support to download a test program. |
| 6/28/2000 |
| Welcome to the new site. I hope you like it. It should be easier for me to manage it at this location, which should mean keeping it up to date ;) I would like to attempt to make this a more generic Visor on Linux support site. Let me know what you think. |
| 6/27/2000 |
| FYI, a new utility for use with the Eyemodule (http://www.eyemodule.com/) has been written by Tamer Fahmy . Check it out in the Utilities section. |
| There is a new mini-howto written by Ryan VanderBijl (rvbijl@users.sf.net) with some post-editing by me. Get this via the link in the navigation frame to your left. This should be sufficient to get you going, we hope. If not, let us know. |
| Note that the page /www.suse.cz/development/usb-backport contains the most recent backport of kernel 2.4 usb to 2.2 kernels. Please use this instead of patches you may find here. Those were meant for a specific time and are no longer relevant. |
| LinkUSB is now a reality, thanks to more tips from Handspring. To download it, follow the FTP link near the bottom of the page. |
| This application has been tested on Linux, but should work on Win98 and MacOS with a proper ppp daemon. Good luck finding one, though. You would also need a host driver that assigns a serial port(s) to the Visor. |
| See the handspring Feedback section... |
| In the beginning: |
| Yes, it is working! No, it is not optimized for speed yet. It seems to run at the standard serial rate with pilot-xfer at least. I get max about 57600. YMMV. |
| First ever Visor->USB->Linux hotsync achieved Friday. January 21, 2000!! This was done with kernel 2.3.40 and a subsequent patch from Greg. The patch is available via the ftp link near the bottom of this page. The driver now reports data coming back from the Visor. For the new setup commands, this matches what can be seen in the CATC trace (see link below). |
| Apparently, the person working on this in FreeBSD has also had success prior to ours. Because of the nature of the FreeBSD usb stack, his work is via modifications to pilot-link. Congratulations, Louis! |
| Driver Status |
| The driver is in the devel kernel as of version 2.3.36. The current driver is being implemented as a builtin part of the usb-serial driver. The driver author, Greg, has written this with minimal support from me (testing and small patches). |
| The driver began talking with a small patch post kernel 2.3.40. |
| Click here for a sample of the data stream during a typical Visor-Win98 connection. These were decoded back in January to enable the driver to work. They include the vendor-specific setup commands that enable the USB communication. |
| Download the native CATC trace - visor-win98.zip |
| Website for CATC to download the windows viewer here. |
| Greg's comments: |
| -------------------------------------------- |
| HandSpring Visor USB docking station |
| Current status: |
| Only when the Visor tries to connect to the host does the docking station show up as a valid USB device. When this happens, the device is properly enumerated, assigned a port, and then communication is possible. The driver cleans up properly when the device is removed, or the connection is a canceled on the Visor. |
| When the Visor is connected to the host, the driver should tell you which Visor port is bound to which ttyUSB?? port. Use the HotSync port to do your HotSync with pilot-xfer. The Generic port can be used by other programs to communicate with the host. |
| ---------------------------------------------------- |
| greg k-h |
| greg@kroah.com |
| Get Involved |
| There is a new mini-howto available Here |
| You can participate in development and testing by first installing and maintaining a current linux development kernel. Note that 2.3.40 is the first version to actually work WITH the patch. Kernels can be retrieved from Kernel.org or one of its mirrors. |
| The latest kernel will be in the v2.4
subdirectory there, and pre-patches are in the testing directory. |
| Get the most recent development kernel or the backport patch via www.linux-usb.org. Note that kernel 2.2.18 pre patches by Alan Cox now include the USB backport. |
| You should definitely read the kernel documentation for USB if you are coming into this cold. You will need to create some device files for the usb-serial driver, the instructions for which are in the file: |
| /usr/src/linux/Documentation/usb/usb-serial.txt |
| An upgrade of modutils and other packages may be needed as well. |
| If you decide to try it, you can run pilot-xfer /dev/ttyUSB1 -l AFTER pressing the hotsync button on the cradle. |
| The Visor should sing its little tune to let you know it is talking. |
