Registered: Nov 1999
Location: Kennett Square, PA, USA
Posts: 26

I just installed IRLink 1.5 from IS/Complete for the Visor. First it said I had to install the IR Enhancement Upgrade from Palm, so I did. The upgrade installed perfectly. I then installed IRLink.prc and it said it needed a reset (which was mentioned in the IRLink manual, so I wasn't worried). I clicked reset, the PalmOS splash screen came on then went away. I waited for the prefs screen to come on, but instead the PalmOS screen flashed again. I tried a reset, a "soft" reset, and eventually I HAD to do a hard reset which fixed the problem. I had all my Hackmaster hacks disabled, so that's not it, and I've never had a problm with this before. Anyone have any ideas about this?
-Jon

Registered: Jan 2000
Location:
Posts: 5

Did you install all of 3com's upgrade?
That happened to me. It crashes and crashes

The documentation of IRlink is just awful.
If you read closely, you realize that there
is only one file in the upgrade that you must
install: SerIrCommLib.prc together with
the two files in the IRlink zip. That's it.

That will solve the problem.

It works marvelously among visors. I had
trouble though with syncing big files to my
desktop. It drops the connection. Could
you try and tell me if it works for you?

Good luck,
Platy

Registered: Nov 1999
Location: San Diego, CA
Posts: 153

from the Handspring site:

Q. Is the Visor compatible with the Enhanced IR software available on the palm.com website?

A. The Visor does not support enhanced IR at this time. The .prc files that are included in the Enhanced IR package are known to cause errors when loaded on a Visor handheld. It is strongly recommended that you do not install the files. If you have installed the files, you will need to perform a HotSync operation to synchronize your data then perform a hard reset to completely remove all of the .prc files that have been installed.

Registered: Nov 1999
Location: Kennett Square, PA, USA
Posts: 26

Aha! I guess I deserved the hard reset because I didn't read the Handspring FAQ. After the hard reset I install just the .prc file noted in the IRLink manual and got it working, however my computer's IR port appears to be broken. Oh well, I guess I'll just have to wait for my new computer (Athlon 750 384MB RAM) to come next week. Thanx for all the help

Registered: Sep 1999
Location:
Posts: 95

So THAT'S what cause the problem for me! Fortunately, I had backed up everything onto my backup module. Unfortunately, that 'everything' included the misbehaving .prc files.

Fortunately, i had also recently done a full backup onto my Linux box so I still had everything. Unfortunately, it took from 12:37am (when the reset loop occurred), til nearly 5:00am to get everything restored. <insert hours of cursing here>

Since then I've been using IBM's 'Workpad Only' IRSync software with no problems, except being annoyed by the 38.4kbps connection after seeing the 115Kbps connection with IRLink.

Now that I know what the problem is I may just have to try it again. (Seems they should have included ALL the files you need in their download...
or at least been more clear about the fact that you SHOULDN'T install those other ones.

Registered: Jan 2000
Location:
Posts: 5

Ohh somebody else using linux! great!
Theo, can you tell me if your infrared port works with linux too?

I have it almost working except that it drops the connection on big files. Have you done anything with it? (mmm, maybe you don't have an IR port on it? )

Any other linux tricks out there? Maybe I should post a general topic for visor and linux a tricks.

Platy

Registered: Sep 1999
Location:
Posts: 95

platypus:
Actually, getting the IR port configured in Linux is my next project after get my laptop upgraded from Mandrake 6.0 to Mandrake 7.0 I'm hoping some of the new utilities will make it easier.

Got any tips on how to get started?

Registered: Jan 2000
Location:
Posts: 1

HELP!

OK, I finally got the IR enhancement installed w/o requiring me to HARD reset my Visor. Now, my problem is realted to the HotSync app on my laptop.

When I go into Control Panel to configure my IR port, it says it is "providing application support on com 5 and lpt3."

BUT, when I try to select com 5 from the HotSync software on my laptop, only 1-4 are listed. The ONLY one that HotSync likes is 4 (it says all other com ports are not available.)

So when I try to sync, of course my Visor cannot find my laptop's IR port and gives an error about setup.

Any ideas?

I removed the IR port from my laptop and let windows re-install it in hopes of having it be available to a port other than 5. Did not work. Please help!

Registered: Dec 1999
Location:
Posts: 4

I had this same problem. You need to make a registry change so that HotSync will recognize COM5. Using regedit, do a search on "directcomport". Change it's value to "COM5". I found two different places where "directcomport" is found. I changed both. (As a side note, one of the Palm upgrades fixes HotSync so that it will recognize COMs above 4. Of course, it's incompatible with the Visor)

There is a thread called "infrared hotsync? possible?" in the How To/Troubleshooting section that goes over this as well (Do a search on "COM5"). That's where I got this information, so I cannot take any credit for it. Plus there is another regedit change that is also mentioned somewhere in the thread that might also work if the previous doesn't.

Hope that helps.

Registered: Jan 2000
Location:
Posts: 5

Theo (and any other linux user out there):

best place to get started with infrared on linux is the linux-IRDA web page: http://www.cs.uit.no/linux-irda/index.html
and then the howto: http://www.snafu.de/~wehe/index_li.html

Now, beware of the howto (in the following sense) it's in between versions. That is IRDA development is changing amazingly fast so there are some examples that belong to older versions of the code. My recommendation is to take the latest kernel (I got 2.2.14), add the most recent patch and compile it, next download the latest set of utilities (0.9.7 I believe).

Things that you need to know (you'll understand once you read the howto):
- major and minor changed from 60 and 64 to 161 and 0 (actually minor can be any from 0 to 64).
(you'll need this to be able to create a device for you ircomm port with mknod)
- the driver ircomm_tty became ircomm-tty
(you'll need this for conf.modules)
- irmanager is about to dissappear but still works
- and obex is not anymore in the utils packages so don't look for it. (This actually is useful to exchange files by beaming, not syncing or ppp)

If you need a fuller set of instructions let me know. Although I don't want to teach you my mistakes because it still isn't working for me. It'd be nice if it works for somebody else!

Good Luck!
Platy