Treo 755p and General Tips

The immediate issue: I'm trying to get my Treo 755p to talk to
gnome-pilot.  This is under Fedora 8.  I go through the configuration
wizard, but the sync times out before a connection is made.  Relevant
dmesg follows:

hub 2-0:1.0: unable to enumerate USB device on port 4
usb 7-2: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 12
usb 7-2: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
usb 7-2: New USB device found, idVendor=0830, idProduct=0061
usb 7-2: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=5
usb 7-2: Product: Palm Handheld
usb 7-2: Manufacturer: Palm, Inc.
usb 7-2: SerialNumber: PalmSN12345678

This repeats a number of times, perhaps once per attempt to hotsync,
certainly more than once per time I've plugged in the USB cable.

There is no /dev/pilot.  Isn't udev supposed to create this?

The larger issue: I can't find any documentation about how the various
technologies and configuration files relating to gnome-pilot interact.
Based on searching, it seems my problem could be related to udev,
libusb, devices.xml, hal, or goodness knows what else.  It's very
difficult to know where to start troubleshooting.

Jay