bbcharge for dummies
 

I installed Xandros on my Dell XPS to extricate Windows from my life...not to add frustration!

While I am very happy that my machine no longer crashes 3-4 times per day (in fact it has only crashed once in 3 months!), I don't have the time to learn the nitty gritty of linux or any other type of operating system.

Is there no simple way for me to get my new BB World Edition to work (charge, synchronize with my organizer, transfer media files) with this operating system? [Maybe you could also help with my Garmin 305] Nice toys that I don't seem to be able to use

I have other applications that I've been successful creating "bottles"

Thanks,

hola, and welcome to BBF.

I think the main problem you're going to face here is that few people use Xandros around these parts (honestly I know of very few anywhere in my travels) which is going to severely limit anyone's ability to help you out. I've personally never installed it or worked with "bottles" (I'm assuming that's a package format?) to know anything.

Unfortunately different distros do things their own way, which can be frustrating. I myself first installed Ubuntu (I'm a long time Fedora user) this past week and was immediately slapped in the face by two very, very non-standard changes (*) they made to "the linux way" that no only threw me for a curve, but made me think twice about ever using it. The point being since I don't know Xandros I'm not sure what tomfoolery they've done under the hood which could cause you problems.

==
(*) the removal of traditional sysvinit in favor of upstart (so no /etc/inittab, wtf?) and the use of these nasty UUIDs in /etc/fstab. what were you people thinking, how many ways can you confuse linux users with non-standard changes to core functionality that's been in UNIX/linux for over a decade or two?

Regarding this specifically, there's no extremely simple way for any of us yet; the Barry team is hot & heavy on development, right now they're working hard on the OpenSync and Evolution transfers (see the official mailing list), but the device charging functionality is pretty much complete. RIM provides no documentation regarding all of this, so the programmers are having to reverse engineer everything from scratch - this take a lot of time, as you can imagine.

In time we'll have a super easy, polished solution. :)

Thanks for the feedback...

It is pretty dissapointing that RIM isn't providing support for Linux...and by the sounds of it I could be looking for a new PDA before a solution is found.

As mentioned in some other thread - there's no money in Linux for RIM, really. Their BES platform runs on Windows only (and integrates with Exchange), so from that perspective the admins they court are not the unix/linux guys, it's the Exchange admin camp and traditional Windows IT departments. The consumer market - to them - is worth it for the data services they sell on the backhaul, not the devices themselves or the OSes they support. Having PocketMac is still really good, even that much is more than Windows Mobile can give a Mac user.

See my sticky thread regarding syncing your device -- the BB is an entirely capable platform even without linux support (well, in it's infancy). I use syncml to keep everything backed up to a server in the sky, I don't use desktop apps (Evolution et. al).

I installed the latest version....Barry I think it's called. I actually charged my Pearl in Ubuntu yesterday for the first time.

Right on. I'm tickled that my 8320 just charges in Fedora 8 thanks to the new kernel module, I don't even need to mess with Barry now since I don't want anything other than charge support. Not that I don't think the project is worthwhile, but my personal needs have now been met by the distro out of the box. :)

I just wanted to know if Barry supports the 8830, I have tried barry 0.10 and these was no success.

i am running linux mint 4.0

I've been trying to mess with linux mint 4.0 (with little luck but I'm still hopeful) but I was just wondering if you had to do anything to this release in order to charge my pearl and transfer stuff from my computer to my media card on my pearl.