Linux

WARNING! The following article is very old, in fact more than 2 years old!

It's a kind of pain to make work together Linux, AvantGo, Evolution and Sony Clie or any Palm devices. Sony Clie is well recognised by kernels >= 2.4 through the USB Serial converter, and simply linking /dev/pilot to /dev/ttyUSB0 enabled to sync it with most sync tools available in Linux, including JPilot. However, Evolution, which I think is by far the best PIM available in Linux, causes a problem syncing, probably due to its use of gnome pilot. Gnome-pilot seems to have stopped being developed and it hardly has any documentation, as far as I know. But I still wanted to make Evolution and my Clie sync! In addition, I like AvantGo (http://www.avantgo.com), which provides a free service to download news from various sources on the Internet and, again, want to sync through Linux.

WARNING! The article below is based on my experience with VMWare Workstation 3. It may well be old so the users of the article are at their own risk!

Note VMware uses usbdevfs to access Linux host's USB system.

1. Make sure that usbdevfs is enabled in your kernel. (If not, you should recompile your kernel with that enabled)
2. Reboot the system with the new kernel (if you recompiled it). You should be able to see /proc/bus/usb (under RedHat, at least)
3. Edit /etc/fstab and add the following code:

none /proc/bus/usb usbdevfs noauto 0 0

4. Mount /proc/bus/usb and you should be able to use USB under your guest OS.

For more information, please visit vmware.com

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