Mandriva 2008 Spring hotsync with Tapwave Zodiac & J-Pilot

I have been wanting to be able to sync my Tapwave Zodiac1 & 2 pda’s with several different linux distros for about 2 years now with no success. I have been using Mandriva One 2008 Spring with the KDE desktop for over a month now and I think that I have finally found my linux distro of choice. It just seems to work with about everything that I have had problems with in other distros, and a main one was getting my Zodiac pda’s to sync within linux. I had been syncing my Palm m125 with most distos that I have tried both with KDE and GNOME, but I never could get my Zod’s to work. But today was a great day! I took my Zodiac1 and installed J-Pilot 0.99.9 onto my Mandriva system and tried the old /dev/ttyUSB1 and it would not work. So I found this link in the Mandriva Wiki and I found where it said “The visor module is blacklisted, in /etc/modprobe.d/visor, so /dev/ttyUSB1 does not exist” I was getting an error saying that /dev/ttyUSB1 did not exist so I figured I was on the right track. The Wiki also went on to say to enter “usb:” and that would take care of it. I am not going to go into all the details about J-Pilot but if you are trying to get your Zodiac to sync with linux this works great. I am using Mandriva linux and there are a lot of issues that I have had problems with using other distos, but with Mandriva so far I have had nothing but good experiences with everything that I have done.

Defective, counterfit Sony Memory Stick PRO Duo cards on ebay?

I have recently purchased a few MS PRO Duo cards from different sellers on ebay and it seems that they are all bad. 2 have broken and 1 wont let me insert it into the PSP any more. The defective part comes down to the same thing on all of them, the little part that covers the front of the card breaks off or is not aligned properly. I have a store bought Sony 2GB card and it works fine and the craftsmanship seems better than the others. I also have 2 SanDisk cards and they are built even better than the Sony cards, in fact I think I will only buy SanDisk cards from here on out. I just purchased an 8GB Sony card off ebay and it has not arrived yet and I am getting the feeling that it will be defective also. I have a 4GB SanDisk card coming from Amazon.com, and I hope this will be a good one. I am wondering if anyone else has found this to be a problem with MS PRO Duo cards purchased off ebay or other discount suppliers? I have had SD cards for years with no problems and not all are name brand, is it just the MS PRO Duo cards that are built cheaply? And they are also the most expensive of the different media cards. I was thinking about buying an adapter for Micro SD cards that will fit into the PSP, has anyone done this? I think that as of this blog I will only buy my MS PRO Duo cards from a brick and mortar store or just stick with SanDisk. I have inserted the broken cards into the adapters that come with the cards and can use them with my computer for file storage kind of like a flash drive, but I cant use them with the PSP and this is why I bought them. Anyway check out the image and if you have had the same problem let me know, I don’t think I am the only one that is getting bad media like this.

Top view of defective cards.

Bottom view of defective cards

Broken card with piece that broke off.