Charging the BlackBerry on Linux
29th December 2006
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For those of you with BlackBerry devices plugged into your
Linux machines, you've probably noticed the frustrating fact
that no matter what you do, it only asks for 100mA, and then
complains that it doesn't have enough power.
And yet in Windows, it all works seamlessly.
Debugging this was a challenge, because I could not seem to find anything special happening on the USB level, when I used either USBSnoop on Windows, or usbfs_snoop on Linux with VMware.
Turns out there was a bug in the usbfs_snoop logging code, which you can fix with this patch (or wait for the next kernel release).
With this patch, the full proprietary USB conversation is exposed, and quickly duplicated for Linux. You can download the juicy results at the Barry project site. Look for bcharge in the SourceForge file downloads section.
Happy New Year!