Perhaps I know enough now to reduce this to a simple procedure. Here is the spoiler -- "No". And it is not my fault. Things change every time I try to do this.
I tried the sequence that worked the last time. I powered on the 66i, then plugged it in via a USB cable to the lowest USB ports on the front of my linux desktop. Then I waited quite a while and (as expected) for two icons to appear on my desktop (GARMIN and "32 GB Volume"). But then the icons vanished an my unit powered off! What the heck?
I power it back on, leaving the cable attached. No icons. Now we get to experiment and try to sort this out.
I unplug the cable. The 66i tells me it has lost power and gives me a countdown and warns it will power off, I push buttons to tell it to stay on. I plug it back in. No icons. Also no USB traffic in the linux logfile. I unplug it again, this time telling it to go ahead and power off. Now I power it back on with the cable disconnected. I plug it back in, no log messages, no icons. The 66i is moody.
I grab a different cable (note that the original cable did work OK for about a minute). I also use a different USB port on the front of my computer. Now I see USB messages pop up in the log. Also the 66i display a cute USB symbol on the front of the screen. The first USB messages are errors, but it eventually thrashes around and enumerates the 66i and sets up a mass storage device. I click on the GARMIN icon (while it is still there) to ensure that linux does mount it, then I do this:
cd /u1/Projects/Garmin/Files make pull cd Activities ls -l *2024* -rw-r--r-- 1 tom tom 21100 Feb 15 08:31 '2024-02-15 15.31.06.fit'> And there we have what I want, albeit with a lot of pointless struggle and a certain dose of profanity. Why does the 66i have this Monte Carlo behavior over USB? Why doesn't it "just work" like thousands of other USB devices on the planet? We will probably never know.
Tom's backpacking pages / tom@mmto.org