Registered: Jul 2000
Location: Vancouver, BC, Canada
Posts: 415

getting the visor to make a pppd connection to linux

Man, I am having so much trouble with this. I'm almot dead certain my linux box is set up right, and its serial port is activated, but when i try to connect on the visor, it(the visor) tells me that the 'serial port is in use'. This is obviously not right, since it hotsyncs fine to my windows PC.

My visor Prefs:

Network:
service:myrouter
username:test
password:-prompt-
phone:00 (this aparently should keep the visor from actually tring to dial, and just go ahead and connect)

Network>Details:
Connection type:PPP
idle timeout:Power off
query DNS: (checked)
ip address:(auto)

Modem:
Modem: Custom
Speed 19200bps
speaker: low
flow ctrl: auto
country: other
string: -blank-

This is the line I have in my inittab file on my linux box:

palm:2345:respawn:/usr/sbin/pppd /dev/ttyS0 19200 192.168.25.21:192.168.25.22 proxyarp
persist local noauth silent nodetach ms-dns 192.168.25.2


I got this info from http://www.geocities.com/bobstro/linux_palm_ppp.htm

The annoying thing is all the sites that deal with this assume you have palm os 3.5, which has very different network settings.

Can anyone help?

__________________
-thorin

I have a webcomic. You should read it, or I may do something rash. <b><a href=http://driveby.keenspace.com/>Drive-by Loitering</a></b> is updated every monday, wednesday and friday.

<!img src=http://www.frontfly.com/myrouter/vcsig2.gif alt="Soundsgood is too elite for the punks."><img src=http://www.frontfly.com/vcsig.gif ><!img src=http://www.frontfly.com/myrouter/vcsig2.gif alt="Soundsgood is too elite for the punks.">

Registered: Jun 2000
Location: Sunnyvale, CA
Posts: 216

Try this...

Try this:

First, set "Flow Control" to "OFF", but this is not your main problem. The "Serial Port In Use" error is caused by a built-in keyboard daemon (sp?) in the Visor. The only way to clear the error is to soft reset the Visor when it is in the Serial Cradle. Then to prevent the error from ever coming up again, make sure that the Visor is OFF before you either place it in the serial cradle or remove it from the serial cradle.

Now for the bad new (unless you can solve this one): A Visor with Palm OS 3.1 simply does not want to do a direct serial connect with the "Phone #" set to "00". At least I could never get it to work with my Visor Deluxe. It works fine if you dial a real phone number with a real modem, but nothing seems to even come out the serial port when you use "00".

One possible work-around is to set up your Linux box to pretend it is a "modem" and accept the AT command strings and return the appropriate result codes to trick the Visor into thinking it is talking to a modem. I have no idea on how to do this or if it is even possible because I don't have Linux.

Registered: Dec 2000
Location:
Posts: 152

Does your ppp link need to be via the serial port? If it is at all possible, ppp over USB is pretty trivial to start up even with VDX's and much faster(57600 vs. 9600 for serial). My old 100 Mhz Pentium linux box does fine with Mandrake 7.0 which comes with the USB backport.

I've tried to get a serial cradle ppp link going but have never succeeded.

Registered: Jul 2000
Location: Vancouver, BC, Canada
Posts: 415

Well, I reset it in the cradle, but now i get a "ppp timeout error" on the visor

Unfortunately, I don't have a USB port on my box. I've only got ISA slots anyways.

huh. I guess its just one more reason to get a prism.

One possible work-around is to set up your Linux box to pretend it is a "modem" and accept the AT command strings and return the appropriate result codes to trick the Visor into thinking it is talking to a modem. I have no idea on how to do this or if it is even possible because I don't have Linux.

Hmm. I have no idea how i'd go about doing that....

thanks, though.

__________________
-thorin

I have a webcomic. You should read it, or I may do something rash. <b><a href=http://driveby.keenspace.com/>Drive-by Loitering</a></b> is updated every monday, wednesday and friday.

<!img src=http://www.frontfly.com/myrouter/vcsig2.gif alt="Soundsgood is too elite for the punks."><img src=http://www.frontfly.com/vcsig.gif ><!img src=http://www.frontfly.com/myrouter/vcsig2.gif alt="Soundsgood is too elite for the punks.">