Recently, Sun released version 3.1 of the Sun Ray Server Software. It now has Linux support for USB devices connected to the thin clients. Instead of being kernel-level, this support is user-level — in the form of a modified libusb. Unfortunately, roughly 97% of applications expect kernel devices, and thus lack support for libusb. Luckily, pilot-link belongs to the minority. The following are my (roughly chronological) notes on getting a Palm (in the form of an old Handspring Visor) to sync with my Sun Ray.

  • You'll need to have libusb 0.1.8 or newer installed. For reference, RHEL3 doesn't have a new enough version; I needed to find a non-standard RPM.
  • Get the latest version of pilot-link from http://www.pilot-link.org/. I used 0.12.0-pre4. You'll almost certainly need to compile it, since even if your distro has a package for it, it probably won't be compiled with libusb support.
  • Be sure to add the --enable-libusb flag when you run configure for pilot-link. (I assume the reader knows how to compile and install stuff under Linux)
  • When you run commands that you want to use the Sun Ray libusb support, you need to run them with the LD_PRELOAD environment variable to include "/opt/SUNWut/lib/libusbut.so.1".
  • I'm not sure what most of the executables that pilot-link installs do, but I know the important one is pilot-xfer. This command line works for me: bin/pilot-xfer --port usb: -s $HOME/.pilot-link This command will fail unless you have the Palm already trying to sync. You'll also need to run it as root, although the pilot-link guys say they're working on a fix for that.

I'm still on the hunt for something that will allow me to access data on a USB thumb drive.