barry - Requirements
Charging and the Kernel

One of the main features of Barry is the ability to control the charging modes of the Blackberry, as well as changing configuration modes on Pearl-like devices.

In order to achieve proper charging, udev is setup to run the bcharge program every time you plug in your Blackberry.

Recent kernels have a module called berry_charge, which does similar things from the kernel level. These two methods can conflict if both run at the same time.

Due to this conflict, the binary packages are setup to install a blacklist file under /etc/modprobe.d, which will disable berry_charge as long as you have the barry-util package installed.

If you are not using the binary packages, you can use the sample blacklist file that comes with the source tarball.

Power and the Kernel

Recent kernels also have the ability to put the USB bus and its devices into suspend mode. Kernels included in Ubuntu 7.04 and Fedora 7 have this turned on by default.

When bcharge runs, it successfully changes the Blackberry to use 500mA (its normal power level for charging), but then the kernel puts the device into suspend mode. This can have various undefined effects, such as the charge icon disappearing on the device, or having your device lose its charge in an accelerated manner.

Bcharge attempts to work around this by writing to the control files under `/sys/class/usb_device/.../device/power/` to turn autosuspend off. Depending on your kernel version or kernel config, these files may not be available, but in most cases at least one of the needed files are there.

If you continue to experience trouble charging your Blackberry:

- consider upgrading your kernel (Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy patches their 2.6.22 kernel to fix this, for example)
- recompile your kernel with CONFIG_USB_SUSPEND disabled

Device Ownership and Permissions

The Barry toolset performs all its actions through the /proc and/or /sysfs filesystems, using the libusb library. This requires that you have permissions to write to the USB device files setup by the kernel.

This is handled differently on various systems:

- On Debian based systems, there is a group called plugdev, which is used to control permissions for pluggable devices. When the barry-util deb package is installed, udev is configured to set Blackberry device permissions to the plugdev group. Make sure your user is in the plugdev group.
- On Fedora based systems, ownership is controlled by the ConsoleKit package. This changes ownership of pluggable devices to the user currently logged into the console, on the theory that anyone at the console should have control of the devices he plugs in. No special support is needed by Barry if you have this package installed.

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