Converting Blackberry contacts into QTopia

[Ian Darwin]

I won't say it was easy or pretty, but I did it.

The only two things I really need the Blackberry for (apart from stable 
calling :-)) are the password safe (which I have written a replacement 
for, and others exist), and the alarm clock (might have to put a new 
fresh battery in my alarm watch).

Trying to cut the umbilical cord to my Blackberry 7290 before its aging 
bones turn to dust, I've been moving stuff to my ASU-software Freerunner.

Note that ** I do not advocate that anybody else do this yet**.

I'm just documenting what I did in case anybody else likes living on the 
edge (Hey, I run OpenBSD -current on my laptop, so I can put up with 
e.g., OpenOffice being broken for a day or two while I resolve 
conflicting ports updates). Or if somebody wants to try this once things 
are more stable :-)

1) Getting contacts out of Blackberry (requires Unix or Linux, might 
work on Windows with emulation of UNIX: cygwin, mingw, etc).

Download 'barry' from http://www.netdirect.ca/software/packages/barry/

Run btool to dump the Contacts database to "contacts.txt" (I forget the 
exact syntax here, sorry). Do NOT use the LDIF option!

2) Convert contacts to SQL format for SQLite.

Download my barrycontacts2qtsql from 
http://www.darwinsys.com/openmoko/barrycontacts2qtsql

Or, setup an anoncvs form my repo as per instructions
at http://javacook.darwinsys.com/download.html; it's in the "scripts" 
project, as are the backup and restore scripts cited below (hundreds of 
other UNIX shell scripts too); this way you'll get updates if I make any.

Run it:

awk -F': +' -f $(SCRIPTS)/barrycontacts2qtsql contacts.txt > contacts.sql

3) Grab a copy of the existing database

ian:15$ cat bkup_om_contacts
#!/bin/sh

scp phone2:/Applications/Qtopia/qtopia_db.sqlite ~/openmoko/


4) Merge bb contacts into sqlite

In theory using any sql database tool (I used my own SQLRunner tool (see 
http://javacook.darwinsys.com/download.html) with the sqlite-jdbc driver 
from www.zentus.com/sqlitejdbc/ - but that is a LOT of work for you to 
set up; you can probably use the sqlite-browser from
http://sqlitebrowser.sourceforge.net/ and use the "Import Database" 
feature (which does allow you to add to an existing database). Untested 
though.

5) Make sure Contacts is not running, then Scp the merged database back 
to the phone.

ian:16$ cat restore_om_contacts
#!/bin/sh

scp ~/openmoko/qtopia_db.sqlite phone2:/Applications/Qtopia/
ian:17$

6) Lauch the Contacts application.

I now have 800 or so entries in my Contacts list!

For information on setting up TCP/IP to the phone, don't ask me, it's on 
the Wiki.

The three scripts of mine that I mention here can be downloaded  in 
updated versions from my private CVS repo ; see the above download.html 
page for details.