Outlook Calendar and Blackberry issues.

[daitymawr]

I realised I might have posted this on the wrong bit of the forum, so thought I'd re-post it here.

I'm very new to Linux, decided to opt out of my difficult relationship with Windows after Vista refused to accept my new motherboard (last one died an annoying death). Have used Mint to successfully salvage the contents of my hard drive and with the exception of these few issues, see no reason to return to Microsoft.

I don't use most of MS Outlook's features, but am self employed and completely reliant on its calendar (in sync with my Blackberry Torch 9800) to administer my business - appointments and reminders, and using them to create invoices, record hours spent on different jobs etc. So:
How can I get my Blackberry to sync with another calendar, from scratch, that will work with Linux (or make Outlook work with Mint) - this needs to load historic data from the phone as well, in order to keep a record of where I've been when. And how can I retrieve the contacts and archived data from Outlook without using Windows (won't boot any more so can't use it!)

I'd really appreciate some pointers on these, because at the moment they're a bit of a dealbreaker, and I really don't want them to be.

Big Thanks

[sagirfahmid3]

The MS Office Suite works flawlessly with the latest version of WINE, ver. 1.4
If you could "acquire" MS Office 2007 *cough* *cough* (if ya know what I mean), and install it, it would work flawlessly.

[daitymawr]

Brilliant, thanks for the answer, will do, and I'll let you know how I get on. Will I be able to use WINE to get the Blackberry PC suite to work and sync with said Office package? I've read there are some issues with that. The crux really is that I need the phone and calendar to work together, because I'm either at the PC with no mobile reception, or out on a job nowhere near the PC!

On a slightly different topic, but related; will I be able to get the Office Language Interface Pack (Welsh in my case) to work in Office using WINE?

Help very much appreciated.

[sagirfahmid3]

Will I be able to use WINE to get the Blackberry PC suite to work and sync with said Office package?

Try it out, I'm not sure.

If it doesn't work, there's always VirtualBox--you can "acquire" *cough cough sneeze* and install Windows XP on VirtualBox if you have at least a dual-core system.
Then install the guest expansion pack (for USB support), then add yourself to the vboxusers group (Google it); when you plug in your Blackberry, open VBox and select your phone as the USB device and continue as you would on a regular Windows pc.

[mank_in]

check it out : http://sourceforge.net/projects/barry/
you don't have to manually download from sourcefourge. Just open terminal :

Code: Select all

sudo apt-get install barrydesktop

Don't ask me how to use it. I never try it. I used my BB storm just to play mp4 files for my kids