Connecting Palm Pilots with KPilot

Q I am having a couple of problems with ports. First, as root my Pilot is available on ttyS0 in KPilot, but when I'm logged in as myself KPilot tells me that it is not read/writeable and automatic detection will not find it. It seems that I cannot access ttyS0 as myself, only as root. How do I change permissions if that is the problem? Second, when I'm using Kino it tells me in the preferences that the IEEE1394 subsystem is not responding, whether I am logged in as root or as myself. The modules raw1394, ieee1394, ohci1394 and dv1394 are all loaded.

A You do not have permission to access /dev/ttyS0 as your normal user. While it is possible to change the permissions of the devices, this is not the way things are meant to be done, and will probably result in your having to make the changes each time you reboot. The first thing to do is check who can access each device with

[nelz@localhost ~]$ ls -l /dev/ttyS0
crw-rw---- 1 root uucp 4, 64 Oct 4 00:14

This shows that ttyS0 can only be accessed by members of the uucp group, so you'll need to add your user to that group with

su
gpasswd -a yourusername uucp

You will have to log out and back in for your membership of the uucp group to be recognised. Your Kino problem appears to be due to a missing module. The Lsmod output you gave in your forum post shows ieee1394, raw1394 and ohci1394 loaded, but not video1394. You do have dv1394, but that is used in high-end professional equipment, not consumer level digital video cameras. Once you have the correct modules loaded, you will hit a similar permissions problem as with /dev/ttyS0, but the solution is a little more complex as the devices are owned by root only. To fix this, create a video group and add yourself to it (as root):

groupadd video
gpasswd -a yourusername video

Then ensure the devices are owned by the video group by adding these lines to /etc/udev/10-udev.rules (create the file if it doesn't exist):

KERNEL=="raw[0-9]*",
NAME="raw/%k", GROUP="video"
KERNEL=="video1394*",
NAME="video1394/%n",
GROUP="video"

After a restart, all your permissions should be fixed - you only need to be sure that the correct modules are loaded for KPilot and Kino to work fully.

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