Blackberry in VMware Server on OpenSUSE

I have a Blackberry 7250 from Telus as my phone and PIM device. I got it for free via a promo at Brainshare last year, but I haven’t been using it because I had a perfectly good Motorola phone, and a Palm Zire 71, which I was happy with so the Blackberry with it’s higher monthly data fees seemed unnecessary.

In the mean time, I got an iPod, which had me carrying three devices, and my old phone died, and then my Zire 71 died. I decided to activate the Blackberry on my account and use that as my phone and PIM.

I had that working fine, and got mail working on it and so forth, but since I’m a Linux user I haven’t been able to connect to my PC to back up the settings in the Blackberry. I use VMware Server for all kinds of stuff so I decided to use that to run a Windows 2000 virtual machine, and connect it to my Blackberry to enable me to upgrade the Blackberry firmware and back up the handheld.

I’m running OpenSUSE 10.1 as my Desktop OS, and I have a Windows 2000 workstation VM already built, so I downloaded the Blackberry desktop software into the VM and installed it. Then I connected the Blackberry to the host, and clicked the VM / Removable Devices / USB menu to tell VMware to connect the Blackberry to the VM. The menu showed Empty, instead of the expected Blackberry Device.

I then went searching and found this knowledgebase article in the VMware Technology Network Knowledgebase, which explains that you need to have the usbfs filesystem mounted, which SUSE Linux doesn’t do automatically. A quick su followed by mount -t usbfs none /proc/bus/usb got that mounted. I then rebooted my VM, and the Blackberry device appeared on the USB menu.

I connected the Blackberry device to the VM, and the Blackberry desktop application started up and I was away. I updated its firmware, backed up its contents, and it all worked flawlessly.