Ton van Overbeek's done it again. The developer of the prc-tools patch for supporting debugging of multiple code sections now has developed a TCP/IP-to-USB bridge program for Linux and Cygwin, similar to the one that Florent Pillet did on Mac OS X. This enables direct debugging USB-based devices on those systems, and it also bypasses PalmSource's USBPort.dll meaning it works around some bugs that prevent CodeWarrior or Palm OS Debugger from talking to some devices that don't identify their debug channels correctly.
I've quoted Ton's message about this below. If you're using those tools, I'd urge you to check it out and provide feedback to him.
Subject: [ANN] tcpusb-0.1: USB debugging for m68k-palmos-gdb
Finally you can use m68k-palmos-gdb with USB devices.
I made a tcp-usb bridge (same idea as Florent Pillet's bridge for MacOS) which works both under Cygwin and Linux. For the impatient: the files are on http://www.v-overbeek.nl/tcpusb.
Since I have no way to test all combinations of USB devices and Windows and Linux versions, I need your help to try this out. The best way to send comments is to post them on the PalmSource tools-forum (http://news.palmos.com/read/?forum=tools-forum) and/or sent them to the prc-tools-devel mailinglist at sourceforge (prc-tools-devel@lists.sourceforge.net). When the code turns out to be usable with many devices I might integrate it directly into m68k-palmos-gdb, so you could say something like "target palmos usb:".
I have tried tcpusb 0.1 with a Tungsten T and T3 on WinXP/SP2, Win2K, Linux 2.4.27, 2.6.8 and 2.6.11. Also some limited testing with a Handspring Visor was done.
One caveat for Linux: The 2.6.11-rcx versions do not work due to a bug in the usbfs code. The major distribution affected by this is Knoppix 3.8.x which uses 2.6.11-rc3.
Enjoy.
Ton van Overbeek