Tony

The discovery stuff should not be dependent on pppd. First of all, when you do an "irattach /dev/ttyS2 -s 1" on the Empeg, the device irda0 should come up. You should point the PDA towards the front of the Empeg and cause IR transmission to happen, which hopefully should cause discovery.

The most appropriate way to verify that the two devices can send IR to each other is to use "irdadump". Run irdadump on the Empeg and see if it dumps packets or not. This utility is part of the irda-tools package.

Regards
Amit