I've wrestled with this one before. I believe that udev creates the /dev/ttyUSB0 or ttyUSB1 once the "sync" button is pressed on the cradle. I had to do something with udev in order to get it to create a /dev/pilot symlink to this device on every boot, but at the moment I don't have access to the machine to tell you what it was.
Thank you for your advice. I successfully connected to my palm by starting the hotsync process, then running dlpsh at the command line, listening on port /dev/ttyUSB1.
However, using /dev/ttyUSB1 in Kpilot produced no results.
But with this new information, I looked up the Kpilot documentation, and found myself at this page: http://www.gadgetreview.com/guides/palm-under-linux.html
Which had instructions for Fedora Core 1, but I thought it might be close enough. It instructed that I try the following:
cd /dev ln -s ttyUSB1 pilot ln -s ttyUSB1 palm chmod 0666 pilot palm
And then I tried connecting through /dev/pilot, /dev/palm, and /dev/ttyUSB1. But it was unsuccesful.
So at this stage it seems that the USB connection is okay, the palm pilot is okay, but Kpilot is not. Or there could still be some other issue that I don't know about.
Any ideas what I can try next?
Dave