doc/www/requirements.php

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   5 <div class="subHeader">Charging and the Kernel</div>
   6
   7 <p>One of the main features of Barry is the ability to control the charging
   8 modes of the Blackberry, as well as changing configuration modes on
   9 Pearl-like devices.</p>
  10
  11 <p>In order to achieve proper charging, udev is setup to run the bcharge
  12 program every time you plug in your Blackberry.</p>
  13
  14 <p>Recent kernels have a module called berry_charge, which does similar
  15 things from the kernel level.  These two methods can conflict if both
  16 run at the same time.</p>
  17
  18 <p>Due to this conflict, the binary packages are setup to install
  19 a blacklist file under /etc/modprobe.d, which will disable berry_charge
  20 as long as you have the barry-util package installed.</p>
  21
  22 <p>If you are not using the binary packages, you can use the sample
  23 blacklist file that comes with the source tarball.</p>
  24
  25
  26
  27
  28 <div class="subHeader">Power and the Kernel</div>
  29
  30 <p>Recent kernels also have the ability to put the USB bus and its devices
  31 into suspend mode.  Kernels included in Ubuntu 7.04 and
  32 Fedora 7 have this turned on by default.</p>
  33
  34 <p>When bcharge runs, it successfully changes the Blackberry to use 500mA
  35 (its normal power level for charging), but then the kernel puts the device
  36 into suspend mode.  This can have various undefined effects, such as
  37 the charge icon disappearing on the device, or having your device lose
  38 its charge in an accelerated manner.</p>
  39
  40 <p>Bcharge attempts to work around this by writing to the
  41 control files under <code>/sys/class/usb_device/.../device/power/</code>
  42 to turn autosuspend off.  Depending on your kernel version or kernel
  43 config, these files may not be available, but in most cases at
  44 least one of the needed files are there.</p>
  45
  46 <p>If you continue to experience trouble charging your Blackberry:
  47 <ul>
  48         <li> consider upgrading your kernel (Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy
  49                 patches their 2.6.22 kernel to fix this,
  50                 for example) </li>
  51         <li> recompile your kernel with CONFIG_USB_SUSPEND disabled </li>
  52 </ul>
  53 </p>
  54
  55
  56 <div class="subHeader">Device Ownership and Permissions</div>
  57
  58 <p>The Barry toolset performs all its actions through the /proc and/or
  59 /sysfs filesystems, using the libusb library.  This requires that you
  60 have permissions to write to the USB device files setup by the kernel.</p>
  61
  62 <p>This is handled differently on various systems:</p>
  63
  64 <ul>
  65         <li>On Debian based systems, there is a group called plugdev, which
  66                 is used to control permissions for pluggable devices.
  67                 When the barry-util deb package is installed, udev is
  68                 configured to set Blackberry device permissions to
  69                 the plugdev group.  Make sure your user is in the plugdev
  70                 group.</li>
  71         <li>On Fedora based systems, ownership is controlled by the
  72                 ConsoleKit package.  This changes ownership of pluggable
  73                 devices to the user currently logged into the console,
  74                 on the theory that anyone at the console should have
  75                 control of the devices he plugs in.  No special
  76                 support is needed by Barry if you have this package
  77                 installed.</li>
  78 </ul>
  79