Showing posts with label BlackBerry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label BlackBerry. Show all posts

Saturday, December 19, 2009

Charging & Tethering BlackBerry on Ubuntu 9.04

If you just want to charge your BlackBerry device, there is a stand-alone tool bcharge from the Barry stable. This application scans the USB bus for BlackBerry devices using libusb and sets the USB ports to which they are connected to output 500mA if they are not already doing so. This is installed alongwith Barry so no separate install or configuration is required.

For those interested in tethering their BlackBerry devices, check out the berry4all project which is a free open-source software for tethering a BlackBerry device on linux & mac. Install instructions for berry4all can be found here. The pre-requisites for this are that python, pppd, libusb and the python usb (pyusb) modules need to be installed.


Check out the specs & reviews of Blackberry Pearl 8100 on Amazon:



Sync BlackBerry on Ubuntu 9.04

One of the pitfalls of moving to Ubuntu 9.04 was that my BlackBerry Pearl stopped charging and synching with the computer. Here's how to resolve it ...

After a bit of googling, I stumbled upon the Barry Project which is an open source synchronization, backup, restore & management application for BB devices.

Install Barry
Open the Synaptics package manager & do a quick search for "barry".
Select & install the packages barrybackup-gui, opensync-plugin-barry, barry-util & libbarry0.
Now create a new launcher on the desktop and enter the command as "/usr/bin/barrybackup".

Configure Barry
Connect your BB phone to your laptop and fire up the luancher short-cut created above.
Barry will assign a unique device PIN number and ask you to configure this device.
Assign a meaningful name and configure what you want to Backup & Restore. I normally choose only the Address Book as that is the only thing that I use.
Another option it asks is to Prompt for label on every backup - use this option if you want to append a specific label to the name of the file Barry creates. Note that the file name already has the PIN, date & the time in it so I leave this unchecked.

Use Barry
Now go ahead and press the Backup button to backup whatever you had configured it to!
Also, once the data has been backed up, you can run the launcher to restore previously backed-up data or to backup data again.





Check out the specs & reviews of Blackberry Pearl 8100 on Amazon:



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