mattw.fn_blog()

One of the things that I always fail to do before going to a conference and finding myself without Internet access is setting up a tether to my phone. Google is hosting djangocon, so lack of tubes hasn’t been a problem, but last night I remembered to go dig for a way to get Xandros eeepc talking to my T-Mobile blackberry curve over USB. It seems there are a few options out there for bluetooth, but I don’t have bluetooth built in, and when I’m mobile, I’d rather not use my battery even faster.

Strangely enough, for such a popular phone and computer pair, the options are pretty slim for USB tethering on linux. There is nothing out there that is pre-packaged, but if you don’t mind compiling a little code, you have 2 options. The first, who’s instructions I found on eeeuser forums actually required installing OpenMotif, which just seemed like a horrible idea to me, so I kept digging. After a bit more digging around, I stumbled upon Barry Backup, a tool that provides syncing, charging (you can’t charge off of USB without telling your ports it’s OK to push more power) and tethering / ppp for *most* blackberries.

To get it running on Xandros, you will need to have build tools installed, you can install quite a few of the dependencies with packages from the etch repos, but you’ll need to compile Barry itself. It is probably also worth noting that I couldn’t get the tarball to compile. Grab the Barry source, and you should be good to go.