[Barry-devel] Charging the BlackBerry on Linux

[Chris F. <cd...@fo...>]

Hello Barry fans!

Just released today is a new standalone utility: bcharge.

It uses libusb to scan your USB bus for BlackBerry handhelds, and boosts
the power to 500mA if isn't that high already.

You can download the single source file, or an RPM for this utility,
in the Barry download area:

	http://sourceforge.net/projects/barry

Compiling the source file is pretty easy if you have the stable libusb
library installed:

	g++ -o bcharge bcharge.cc -lusb

The RPM attempts to get fancy and adjust your udev rules so that it
automatically runs bcharge as soon as you plug in your BlackBerry.
The RPM was made on a recent version of Fedora.

As usual, please report any problems you have to the list.  This is
a New Years gift that I want to have working for everyone. :-)

Happy New Year!

- Chris






P.S.  For those interested in what was needed to get this to work:

You'll notice that bcharge.cc is pretty small.  The two USB control
messages are pretty non-standard, and did not show up in any capture
I did, either on Windows with USBSnoop, or on Linux, using 2.6.18
with usbfs_snoop and VMWare.

Turned out that one of the code paths for logging control URBs in the
kernel when using usbfs_snoop was missing the full logging code.
You can patch your kernel with the following patch, or wait for the next
kernel release, which should have this fixed.

	http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=116625529726498&w=2

With that patch, you can see the full proprietary USB conversation using VMWare.

I've added some notes on doing USB captures, which you can find in
Barry's CVS tree:

	http://barry.cvs.sourceforge.net/barry/barry/doc/USB-capture.txt?revision=1.1&view=markup