Article: Ubuntu 8.04 and the BlackBerry Bold

Recently my trusty old BlackBerry 7280 (aka the GhettoBerry) decided it had had enough and gave up the ghost. It may have been the massive arc in the crappy European power adapter I was using a few weeks ago in Brussels... In any case, the transmitter would only work sporadically and for only a few minutes, which, when you're on the road, is very annoying.

So I replaced it with a brand spanking new BlackBerry 9000 Bold. All black and shiny. It has a bright shiny screen, camera, video, mp3 player, even new games! But does it play well with Linux? Of course not. Can I make it play well with Linux? Well, that's what this page is about.

There are three things I want it to do:

1. Work as a USB hard drive so I can copy media files back and forth and, if necessary, use it to temporarily hold files from my laptop.
2. Charge from the USB connection. I could never get the 7280 to do this.
3. Sync with my Zimbra contacts list. I'm not hopeful about this one...

Bold as a USB drive

The first time I plugged in the Bold a drive icon popped up on my desktop and Rhythmbox opened. "Cool," I thought, "in classic Ubuntu form it just worked." But did it? When I started copying files to it things went just plain wrong. The Bold popped up the "Enable Mass Storage Mode" dialogue, I clicked "OK", waited, then it popped up again. No matter how many times I clicked it it kept coming back. And nothing was transferring to the device. This was disappointing.

In the syslog file I would see repeated "reset high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address #" messages. Upon further investigation I learnt that this may be due to the setting for the maximum amount of data that will be transferred to or from the device in a single command, as set in /sys/block/sdb/device/max_sectors once the device is connected. The default setting is 240, which equates to 120KB. This value works for most devices, but the Bold doesn't like it. I changed it to 128 (aka 64KB) using "echo 128 > /sys/block/sdb/device/max_sectors", which is the default for Windows, and hey presto! It worked!

The next question was how to make this the default. Digging deeper into it I learnt that the udev system is responsible for detecting hot plugged devices now and it is controlled by scripts in /etc/udev/rules.d. I added the following line to /etc/udev/rules.d/80-programs.rules to set the default max_sectors value to 128 for all devices. It may result in a slight performance hit, but functionality is more important to me at this point. I may try playing with some benchmarks some day...

      # Blackberry Bold is not happy with max_sectors=240 - JayM 20090317
      SUBSYSTEM=="block", BUS=="usb", KERNEL=="sd*", ATTRS{idVendor}=="0fca", RUN+="/bin/sh -c 'echo 128 >
      /sys/block/%k/device/max_sectors'"

Note: that's only two lines... the SUBSYSTEM command should be one line. It's split for formatting...

Next time I plugged in the Bold and checked max_sectors it was set to 128 and everything worked as expected. Now I can copy files back and forth without any issues.

My next issue was it launching rhythmbox every time I plugged it in. I use rhythmbox for managing my music, but this device is not, to me, a music device but rather a mass storage device. So I want it to just act like I'd plugged in a USB Flash drive. Fixing this involved removing the entries for defining the Bold as a portable audio player in the hal database. Edit /usr/share/hal/fdi/information/10freedesktop/10-usb-music-players.fdi, search for <!-- RIM --> and comment out the matches to add to the portable_audio_player keys:

   <!-- RIM -->
   <match key="@storage.originating_device:usb.vendor_id" int="0x0fca">
     <!-- Blackberry 8100 (Pearl), 8000 (Curve), 9000 (Bold) -->
   <!--
     <match key="@storage.originating_device:usb.product_id" int_outof="0x4;0x6;0x8004">
       <addset key="portable_audio_player.access_method.protocols" type="strlist">storage</addset>
       <append key="portable_audio_player.input_formats" type="strlist">audio/mp4</append>
       <append key="portable_audio_player.input_formats" type="strlist">audio/mpeg</append>
       <append key="portable_audio_player.audio_folders" type="strlist">BlackBerry/music/</append>
       <append key="portable_audio_player.audio_folders" type="strlist">BlackBerry/videos/</append>
     </match>
     <match key="@storage.originating_device:usb.product_id" int="0x8004">
       <append key="portable_audio_player.audio_folders" type="strlist">home/user/music/</append>
       <append key="portable_audio_player.audio_folders" type="strlist">home/user/videos/</append>
     </match>
   -->
   </match>

Next time the Bold is plugged in it only showed up as a mass storage device - exactly as I intended.

Charging the Blackberry

Actually, it looks like this is just working... I'll explore more and find out...

Jay MacDonald
March 2009