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I'm a grad student, therefore I don't have a lot of money to be able to buy the latest gadgets. I'm happily collecting the 'old junk' discarded by friends who are able to buy newer gadgets. Most of the times these devices work just fine, they are just old and slow. Some time ago I became the proud owner of a Sony Clié Handheld Device. This PDA isn't being made anymore and runs Palm OS 4. It worked fine using Linux, until the Feisty Fawn upgrade was released.
After upgrading to Feisty Fawn I wasn't able to use gnome-pilot to sync the device. It gave error messages and complained my kernel wasn't supporting USB to sync, it needed the visor module to be precise. To me this was a minor problem, as I am a seasoned Linux user, but I learned it turned some friends down who were trying to sync their Tungstens and Treos using Linux. Therefore I will explain here how this seemingly major problem can solved easily.
First you need to install the 'visor kernel module', gnome-pilot is complaining about. That's very easy to do, just open a terminal and type in the following command:
sudo modprobe visor
To check if this command had any effect, we peek into some logs using the following command in the terminal:
tail -f /var/logs/messages
Now plug in your PDA using your USB connector, you should see something like this appearing:
[ 1055.204000] usb 1-1: Handspring Visor / Palm OS converter now attached to ttyUSB0 [ 1055.204000] usb 1-1: Handspring Visor / Palm OS converter now attached to ttyUSB1
Now go to the menu System/Preferences/PalmOS Devices and do the walk-through. Make sure you set your connection type to 'USB', timeout to '2', device to /dev/pilot and speed to 115200. In my case most of these setting are there by default. Turn on the device and tap the 'HotSync' button when the wizard asks you to do it.
You can select the conduits you want to use, if you notice there are only a few options, start 'synaptic' (found under System/Administration/Synaptic Package Manager) and do a search for 'gnome-pilot conduits' and see if the 'gnome-pilot-conduits' package is selected, if not, select it by right clicking and hit the 'apply' button. Your extra conduits will be installed in a moment. To install visor at startup, just open a new terminal window (if you haven't one open now) and type the following line:
sudo gedit /etc/modules
A text document opens now, just simply add 'visor' to the list of modules that need to be started and save the document. Close the document and you're back in your terminal window.
You are now ready to go syncing your PDA in Ubuntu Linux. 
If you run into any trouble after reading this how-to, contact me and I am happy to help out. You also can try looking for your problem visiting the Ubuntu Forums. You probably aren't the first one to encounter this problem. 
Posted under Tips & Tricks
This post was written by Inge on February 27, 2008
Thanks Inge. I haven’t used my clie since I made the complete switch to Ubuntu about a year ago. Thanks to you I’m rediscovering an old friend… I mean toy… I mean tool
Hi Inge. Im’ trying to sync my Clié PEG NX 70V with Ubuntu Gutsy. I’m already using successfully my old Palm m135. When I press the sync button, the Clié happily beeps but on the PC I get the following message ” Unknown palm device. No device with ID 3323. Use gnomecc to configure gnome-pilot” (the message is in italian). What does it mean? Please help I’m rather new to linux
Solved. “Gnome cc Gnome-Pilot” is simply the PalmOS Devices icon in the desktop System/Preferences menu (why do things have multiple names in linux??). Just inserted 3323 instead of the default 1000 value. After configuring Conduits it synced everything. Thanks anyway.