i'm kinda in this battle at the moment. i got a palmos m125. i've tried running palm desktop under wine on linux. tried j-pilot and for the life of me have not been able to get sync working.
Years ago, there was a documented issue when attempting to sync a Newton device with modern PCs (unsure about Linux) over serial, where the default port speed to too fast for the sync software to handle. The solution was to use a slowdown.exe package
https://www.newtontalk.net/archive/newtontalk/2003-December/...
http://www.unna.org/view.php?/windows