I’m playing with my new toy: it’s a Nokia 6630 (I know it’s quite old, but I wanted the s60 phone with more affordable price I could find :P).

Of course I still think the perfect Uber-Geek telephone of my dreams is this, but I fear such devices will remain to be low availability geeky devices unless the various linux phone manufactures will agree to some standard and interoperable platform…

By the way Symbian is truly a very nice little OS, the only pity It’s that it’s not so open, BTW Nokia offers a quite decent SDK, that supports only windows but is based on gcc, cygwin and Perl, I find this a true delirium, but is there some way to set up a working SDK also on Linux/OSX.

So I hope to be able to write something useful for it in the near future, maybe a tool for making a SMS backup without the uberevil PC-Suite (see below) and some themes, because all the futile things are the most important ones 🙂 (and the nice thing is that both the apps and the themes are compatible with all S60v2 based phones, so stay tuned even if you have a model slightly different).

Getting it to play nice with Linux

The most important thing I want from it of course making it to play nicely with Linux, if only for the ugliness of the Nokia tool (PC-Suite, of course Windows only) that is an obtrusive, slow, buggy and bad looking thing 🙂

In this section I will point to some very useful how-tos I found around here

So the things I would like to be able to do with it are:

• Synchronizing addressbook, calendar and notes (works)
• Transfer files with OBEX (works)
• Reading/synching SMSes (still didn’t manage it to work)
• Using the telephone as GPRS modem (works)
• More perverse, using the computer as a modem for the telephone (works)

Of course all these things should work on both bluetooth and with the more convenient USB DKU-2 cable bundled with it.

Available tools

The tools I have tried in my journey are:

KMobileTools

It’s a really nice piece of work (of course the most decent UI on the whole lot :D), but unfortunately at the moment isn’t of much help because at the moment it only supports the old AT protocol that is very crippled on Symbian devices (there is an early Gammu support but unfortunately also Gammu isn’t of much help). All you can do is to see the battery and the signal levels and make outgoing calls.

Gnokii

It’s a tool specific for Nokia phones that (on S60 devices) features a “server” application called Gnapplet that runs on the phone. It should allow to access the addressbook and the SMS archive from the PC. I managed to access the addressbook, but when I try to download a SMS Gnapplet crashes (It also have been reported to crash on Nokia 6600).

Gammu

Gammu is a fork of Gnokii, but as KMobileTools I only managed to access the battery and signal levels with it.

OpenObex

It’s a tool to perform OBEX filetransfers between the phone and the PC, and it works flawlessly.

OpenSync

It’s a relatively new tool (and IMHO the most promising one) to synchronize the addressbook, the notes and the calendar between the phone and the PC, it supports various backends, from simple plaintext ones to integration within Kontact and Evolution. The installation was a little bit tricky but it works quite well.

Gnubox

It basically forces the phone to use its Tcp/ip stack over bluetooth. It installs into the phone and lets you share the internet connection of the PC with the phone.

Synchronizing addressbook, calendar and notes

A very complete how-to on configuring OpenSync can be found at http://blog.dukanovic.com/?p=5. As I said the installation was a little bit tricky because there are needed the most recent version of the tools downloaded form SVN. Only a little note: when he says to download wbxml2 version 0.9.0 and patch it, please do it! Even if the 0.9.2 version has integrated that patch, it doesn’t work (at least with that phone).

Transfer files with OBEX

The how-to can be found at http://wiki.splitbrain.org/nokia_6630. Once you have gotten Openobex working, you can access it via the command line based obexftp client or with an ugly Tcl/Tk interface called ObexTool, there is also a KDE kio-slave, but it doesn’t support an usb connection and I didn’t manage it to work neither on bluetooth. A most promising method is a fuse based filesystem called obexfs, but at the moment also it doesn’t seem to work very well.

Getting obexftp and obextool to work with bluetooth is more straightforward, in order to get them working with the USB cable is necessary to use a very recent version of openobex and obexftp and obextool needs to be patched.

Reading/synching SMSes

Unfortunately I still hadn’t managed it to work. AFAIK the only tool that can be used to access the SMSes is Gnokii (Wammu doesn’t seems to work), but as i said it accesses correctly the address book but Gnapplet keeps crashing when it downloads a SMS (I will seek in the gnapplet source code if I can find the cause but the code seems very cryptinc to me 🙁 ). A basic gnokii setup is also covered on http://wiki.splitbrain.org/nokia_6630.

Using the telephone as GPRS modem

The how-to can be found at http://bitubique.com/content/view/26/42/. I still hadn’t tried it too much because it costs a butt-load of cash 🙂

More perverse, using the computer as a modem for the telephone

Because accessing the internet with the GPRS connection of your phone is soooo costly you may be interested to connect the phone to the internet sharing the connection of the PC. a good how-to can be found at http://www.rlachenal.com/bluetooth-6600-linux/. It’s for the Nokia 6600 but the procedure it’s nearly the same, there are only few minor things to account:

• Download the right version of gnubox specific for the 6630 (gnubox_6630_80_81.sis)
• In gnubox configuration set “2Box Bluetooth” to “Lan Access Server” (instead if you use in under Windows you must set it to “serial”. A good How-to for Windows xp can be found at http://web.singnet.com.sg/~kinston/Bluetooth%20Internet.htm)
• After you have started dund and before actually trying to connect your phone to the internet you must go in the gnubox menu to debug->”bring up IF”
• For Nokia phones it works only with Bluetooth, only for Sony Ericsson it can be used also over usb cable
• Make sure that the shell script used here uses the right interface names, i.e. you create the interface from your PC to the internet (ppp0) before creating the interface from the phone to the PC (ppp1), otherwise you can change the interface names in that script. If you are connected to the internet behind an ethernet adsl router you may want to substitute “ppp0” with eth0.
• the built in applications seems not to support the bluetooth provider, you must install 3rd party apps and configure them accordingly. On gnubox site there is a screenshot showing the configuration for Opera for S60
• When the bluetooth connection is lost it stops working and it for some reasons can’t make a new one. The only way to fix it seems to reboot the phone (LOL :D)