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title: I broke Hotsync
date: 2024-10-09
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UPDATE: I fixed this, see how at the end.
This is Why We Can't Have Nice Things
===========================================
Yesterday I spent a good amount of time syncing my Calendar to the
Zire and made a lot of progress. I have a draft of the process with
exciting things like building multiple dependencies and the why
timezones are bad.
Unfortunately this seems to have broken J-Pilot and it can no
longer hotsync like it did previously, giving the error,
```
pi_bind error: usb: No such file or directory
Check your sync port and settings
Exiting with status SYNC_ERROR_BIND
Finished.
```
Where before hotsync would work without any issues after I added my
user to the dialout group.
The calendar tool I used (palm-calendar-sync2) uses apptainer
HTML palm-calendar-sync2
HTML Apptainer
To make it easier to run (it's sort of like an application in a
Docker container), but I believe it somehow changed permissions or
ownership on something in /dev or /sys that broke other apps from
accessing usb:.
I tried various other things like using /dev/ttyUSB*, but those
don't show up when the Zire is put into Hotsync mode. Searching
around on some forums and in the Palm discord didn't bring much up
either.
My plan now is to install Linux Mint into a fresh VM on the laptop
and compare permissions in /dev and /sys to see what might be
different. Hopefully I can discover what changed and then fix it.
This would also help with palm-calendar-sync2 since I was able to
build it from source and not use apptainer, but I thought it was
broken because it also couldn't access usb: like j-pilot.
This is useful since if there is a bug with timzeones in
palm-calendar-sync2 I might be able to fix it so my calendar sync
works as expected and I won't be 7hrs late to every meeting.
GIF Linux Mint in a VM
Fixing J-Pilot
===========================================
A few hours after I wrote the above, I had an idea on what maybe
could have gone wrong. While building palm-calendar-sync2 from
source, I also had to build the pilot-link libraries, which put
them in /usr/local/lib. On a hunch I did a ldd /usr/jpilot to see
what libpisock it was using, and sure enough it was the freshly
compiled ones and not the ones in /lib/.
Doing a make uninstall in the pilot-link source directory removed
these, and jpilot was using the original libpisock library again.
Firing up a hotsync then worked as expected and the
palm-calendar-sync2 that I built from source also worked.
Now that I have a fully functioning hotsync again it's time to get
back to syncing my calendar, which has proven to have a few
challenges I wasn't expecting.
Links
===========================================
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