Hi Chris, Penned by Chris Frey on 20090612 17:27.01, we have: | On Fri, Jun 12, 2009 at 12:48:05PM -0500, Todd T. Fries wrote: | > Special shout out to Chris Fey who in a post back in May of 2008 mentioned | > a link I had found .. | | Hi Todd, | | Welcome to Barry! It is always good to have more testers on platforms that | I don't have common access to.
Once it works, I'll be using it on macppc and i386 .. though I could try it with sparc64 and a few others *grin*.. | I'm assuming you are referring to my posts to openbsd-tech. Thanks for | the followup. I also saw a mention of my name on the barry dev list in searches yesterday back then also.. | > I'm quite interested now in getting barry to work on OpenBSD, considering it | > is what I use and support, and after having blackberries for over a year my | > wife and I managed to both within a month come into a scenario where the | > m$ desktop manager is necessary to restore the software from scratch and | > we get to pray that it backs up the contact/calendar/etc properly. | > | > Mine didn't go so hot a few weeks ago, and I lost everything. | > | > Now we get to do the same with my wife's tonight. | > | > Suffice it to say, it is going to work one way or another, because we can't | > afford another loss like this again.. | | I'm not aware of what would require a firmware-and-everything reload, except | for a password entered incorrectly too many times. What caused this? In my case, I hit delete at the wrong moment and then accepted removing all icons by accident, which boils down to a full software reload. Not being familiar with the windows desktop software on a relatives computer I wiped without backing up, and that is how I lost everything. My wife was more fortunate. T-Mobile in their infinite wisdom was suggesting a software update for her blackberry pearl incase it fixed four malfunctioning keys on the keypad. So we carefully backed things up with blackberry desktop manager 4.7 and restored it after the software update, but the keys managed to malfunction still. Then the T-Mobile people basically said "buy a new phone" since bad hardware out of warranty is of no use. We had some friends that had a spare phone so now she has an 8820, and I had to downgrade to the blackberry desktop manager 4.3 in order to backup the pearl and restore the calendaring properly, since both 4.7 didn't restore the 4.7 backup from the pearl to the 8820 properly and the 4.3 didn't restore the 4.7 backup from the pearl to the 8820 properly. I look forward to a utility (Barry) that lets me backup and restore without requiring windows, since I don't use windows myself, we had to go visit a friend 30mins away to do the blackberry desktop stuff. | And are you currently able to do backups on the device? You might want to | backup with both the Windows software, and barrybackup, and perhaps even | btool. The more formats you have backups in, the better, even if it is | just a text dump from btool. I agree with that, its just not practical for us to run the blackberry desktop manager, so whatever Barry provides, is what we'll use from now on. | > You never quite got your answers back then, Chris, regarding the finer points | > of userland vs kernel abstraction in OpenBSD. | > | > Basically, if it requires privileges, its better in the kernel, and if it is | > following a standard interface api, its better in the kernel. If the userland | > apps require a special protocol its better in userland. pppoe strattles this | > fence quite thoroughly as there are both kernel and userland implenentations. | | Nothing has changed much in Barry land with regard to kernel integration. | So far, it works quite well, just using libusb for all usb operations. | | When I talked about the possibility of a kernel driver for the modem feature | in the OpenBSD kernel, it wasn't really a recommendation. It was just | to point out that it would be fairly simple to implement in the kernel, if | that's where people think it should reside. Personally I think it should be, but I've been told it would not be written by certain people that have an abhorrence to the way the Blackberry serial protocol works over usb, but I did not get the impression it would not be accepted if it were written. Long term, I'd consider this useful myself personally. | The desktop / database code relies on USB, and while I do provide an API | through the libbarry library, I don't think it is stable enough to go into | the kernel yet. I get the impression this is not over the serial protocol, so yeah. The big ``problem'' in OpenBSD is the lack of the ability to detach a driver and punt a usb device back to ugen. Either you boot a kernel that has an enabled driver that attaches to a specific device, or you don't, in which case it is punted to ugen. Given this philosophy, I'll likely have my blackberry show up as ugen and use barry with libusb until everything is supported via (likely several) kernel drivers. | > Based on everything I've seen wrt blackberry and barry etc I believe long term | > it would be best if OpenBSD could just provide a serial connection and umass | > and perhaps another special interface for talking to the blackberry. | > | > Does barry use the serial connection to do calendar/phonenumber/etc stuff or | > does it require some alternate communication mechanism? | | The databases are accessed through the USB, using libusb. The protocol is | specific to the Blackberry, and the packets are created and parsed in the | libbarry library. It doesn't use bluetooth, although I understand that it | would be possible to access the databases over bluetooth as well. I saw the bluetooth option in the destop manager, is why I knew to ask this. It would be interesting for me since I really dislike tethering my phone now that I can access the internet via bluetooth. | Barry provides modem support with the "pppob" (PPP Over Blackberry) program, | which also uses the USB bus. pppob works the same as pppoe as far as | pppd is concerned, although the only kernel hooks used by pppob are the | USB interface calls used by libusb. I've read about this, sounds very similar to 'rfcomm_sppd' for bluetooth to provide a pseudo tty for serial access over bluetooth. | > In the meantime, disabling umass on the blackberry and/or specifically compiling | > an OpenBSD kernel to not recognize the blackberry as anything other than ugen | > and/or disabling uberry(4) and umass(4) should at the very least make barry a | > viable tool on OpenBSD. | > | > Have you heard of anyone making a port of barry to OpenBSD? I'll do it, I just | > don't want to duplicate any work. | | I've heard of maybe two people using Barry on OpenBSD, but I assume there | are more out there. Bill Paul posted on this list while he was getting | Barry working on FreeBSD as well. Support for the BSDs should be there | out of the box. Ok, I'll get back to you, looks like I've verified it doesn't build with gcc 3.x so I'll try with gcc 4.x next ;-) | I haven't touched OpenBSD since that May 2008 email to the openbsd-tech list, | but when I did try it, things worked very well... it was only uberry that | caused a conflict. Once that was moved out of the way, Barry worked fine. Nice, will keep this in mind. | There should be no need to do a porting effort for Barry on OpenBSD. | At most, general polishing might be needed to get it to the "easy" stage. :-) | And maybe some well-defined mechanism to make Barry and uberry coexist better. When I say 'porting' I mean 'create a port, put it into the ports tree, for all OpenBSD users to enjoy' ;-) | I would greatly appreciate your help on making Barry easier to use on | OpenBSD. Please report any problems you have in getting it working. Will do! Thanks, -- Todd Fries .. t...@fries.net _____________________________________________ | \ 1.636.410.0632 (voice) | Free Daemon Consulting, LLC \ 1.405.227.9094 (voice) | http://FreeDaemonConsulting.com \ 1.866.792.3418 (FAX) | "..in support of free software solutions." \ 250797 (FWD) | \ \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ 37E7 D3EB 74D0 8D66 A68D B866 0326 204E 3F42 004A http://todd.fries.net/pgp.txt ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Crystal Reports - New Free Runtime and 30 Day Trial Check out the new simplified licensing option that enables unlimited royalty-free distribution of the report engine for externally facing server and web deployment. http://p.sf.net/sfu/businessobjects _______________________________________________ Barry-devel mailing list Barry-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/barry-devel
