David MacKay
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Getting hooked up for the first time

I bought a psion 3a in April 96 having heard that they can be happily connected to Sun workstations. This requires
  • A 3-link
  • A 3-link to workstation connection
  • Software
All of these steps have proved more troublesome than expected.
  • Getting a 3-link without having to buy PC or Mac software too seems to be impossible. I wanted to do this, as, on environmental principle, I don't want to buy stuff (packaging, manuals, floppies) that I have no use for, and I don't like to be ripped off. But psion customer service seem adamantly opposed to any personal service of this sort.

    When I said I had bought a Psion and wanted to connect it to my unix machine, the lady said that they only advertised the Psion as being connectable to PCs and Macs, so I couldn't expect them to cooperate. I was not expecting such hostility to a potential market of unconventional users.

  • Once you have a 3-link (I borrowed one) you need a 9 pin to 25 pin adaptor, male to male. This is impossible to buy from any ordinary computer hardware supplier; they only make 9 pin *female* to 25 pin male adaptors. After searching through several catalogues I did find a 9 to 25 male to male cable, and I called them up, but it turned out to be a misprint! So the easiest thing to do is to get the 9 pin *female* to 25 pin male adaptor and add to its female end a 9 pin male to 9 pin male gender convertor. These parts can be obtained very cheap from Hills components (01923 424344) part numbers 26-3063 and 15-3572. The prices are more than 3 times cheaper than other places, so you won't mind having to buy the parts in threes.
    9-25way adaptors can also be obtained from Clove Technologies at a greater price. UK 01202 302796.
    Alternatively you could make your own adaptor. I believe the correct wirings are: nine(1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9) <-> 25(8,3,2,20,7,6,4,5,22).
    Having the thing made professionally by BlackBox would have cost 30 pounds including delivery.
    Final alternative: Apparently you can get a psion 25 pin connector that plugs into the 3-link; but none of the psion vendors ever had such a thing in stock when I called them. I called about four places.
  • I have got the p3nfsd software. When searching for it, you need to know that the package is called p3nfs.pl (not p3nfsd). The latest version of p3nfs is here: ftp.uni-erlangen.de:/pub/psion3/local/utilities/. (Thanks to rfkoenig@immd4.informatik.uni-erlangen.de for bringing me up to date.) Now it is called p3nfs51.tgz or p3nfs-5.1a.tar.gz (see also 3lib This package has a lot more in it than the version 10 which I installed. However, all that follows in this section refers to version 10, and having installed the new version I don't find the old one is now inadequate for my purposes. (But see comments below.)

    I got a friendly sysadmin to get and apply the patches which the Sunos kernel apparently needs.

    Big problem

    All the software packages require that there be an executable program sitting on your psion. How are you supposed to get it there? (Assuming you don't have PCs or Macs, which I don't.)

    I decided the only thing to do was to type in the whole damn nfs program (about 200 lines). (I am amazed at myself!)

    In fact Tim tells me I could have used the drive C in the psi-link as follows: run a comms program `in the cable' to transfer files (in fact the program is already present in the 3a's ROM, and replaces the software in the cable). The workstation would have had to be told to use the relevant protocol. We're not sure how to get a unix machine to do this, but maybe kermit would do the trick. Or even cat file > /tty/deva might have worked. If there are simple ways to transfer files between psions and unix machines, why does the FAQ not mention them? It would have saved a lot of effort. More information can be found below.


Site last modified Tue Dec 27 09:27:43 GMT 2011