http://united-geeks.org/blog - SX1

GNUPoc - Symbian SDK on GNU/Linux

nospam@example.com (n00dl3s) — Tue, 15 Mar 2005 21:47:00 +0100

GnuPoc makes it possible to develop EPOC applications on your GNU/Linux machine. It is using GNU make, Wine and GCC crosscompiler for ARM.

Read the full story at the GNUPoc Website

SX1: SyncML, Multisync, Evolution 2, Gentoo / Linux

nospam@example.com (n00dl3s) — Thu, 17 Feb 2005 21:15:00 +0100

The following information may be outdated, i just keep for personal reasons.

So, my aim was to syncronize my phone and my evolution calendar and addressbook, and Multisync seemed to be what I was looking for.
But, there's trouble ahead. Read on for how to get over it... Turns out Symbian/S60 phones have a rather special (buggy?) dialect of wbxml (WAP-XML) which needs a patched libwbxml2. Since it was not in the Gentoo Portage-Tree, i got the already patched version from here.

Multisync

I knew I had to compile multisync (Gentoo ebuild) with libwbxml2 support which turned out to be tricky (=impossible) when sticking to Gentoo-ebuilds.
The problem is:
The compile-script looks for the libwbxml2 header files in "/usr/include/wbxml2/", but the patched version puts them in "/usr/include/". So I manually copied all of the headerfiles to the newly "/usr/include/wbxml2/" directory and voila: during the compile process I can see:

checking for wbxml_conv_wbxml2xml in -lwbxml2... yes
checking for correct libwbxml2 version... yes

Now i expected a new button in Multisync to appear, but no
The libs seem to be present, but it builds it without libwbxml2-support. I tried a little more to get it working, but without any progress, so I decided to try something else (I was impatient, but there's probably a way to do this the "Gentoo-Way")

I unmerged multisync and d/l the latest cvs-snapshot of Multisync from here. I compiled everything and the long-awaited "Disable String Tables" Checkbox appeared in the menu.

Now I had everything ready to try syncing

Setup Multisync:

Start Multisync
The settings you need are:

1st plugin: syncML
2nd plugin: Evolution2
syncML settings:

SyncML Role: SyncML Server
Connection: http://this computer:PORT
Authentification: USERNAME/PASSWORD
In the "Options"-menu tick both checkboxes ("Interpret UTC as local time" / Disable string tables")

Evolution2 settings:

Pick the right calendar, addressbook and tasks file from the menu.
Setup the SX1

Start the SyncML app and create a new profile:

Bearer Type: Internet
Access Point: DEFINED PREVIOUSLY (see TCP-IP over Bluetooth Howto)
Host Address: IP of Multisync-Server
Port: PORT (like in Multisync)
Username & password (like in Multisync)
Remote Calendar: calendar Remote Contacts: addressbook HTTP Auth: No

OK, now you need the right Gnapplet.sis, which is this one. Transfer it to the phone and install it there.

Putting the pieces together

Start Multisync on PC
Get TCP-IP on the phone working
Start Gnapplet
Start SyncML Process on the phone
Pray to your favourite god(s)
=As many other things, this does not work very "stable". For me, i.e. the first try when starting the sync-process on the phone never works. So what I do is: 'cancel first attempt'&'try again'. This works most of the time
Just try...

Last words

There are some minor issues with the mapping of some field descriptions, e.g. SyncML and Evolution2 won't work together perfectly atm., but I was told by a Multisync developer that maybe in the 0.9 release this will be fixed.
For the moment you should definetely backup both devices (phone and Evolution) before you try anything. Also, you might run into wrong handling of duplicates. I did not want to move back to the old evolution, but maybe there are no such problems like in the Evo2-plugin right now (which is considered 'beta').

BTW:
SX1-Firmware: 14
Evolution: 2.0.3-r2
Multisync: cvs-snapshot from 02/16/2005
Patched wbxml2-0.9.0

SX1: Optimizing videos with Transcode

nospam@example.com (n00dl3s) — Mon, 06 Dec 2004 01:44:00 +0100

The SX1 has quite enough power under the hood to watch movies in reasonable quality. However, the framerate isn't high enough to enjoy fast action movies, but it's perfect for my favourite TV-Show: The Simpsons.

Learn see it's done.
With transcode you have almost unlimited possibilities in En/Decoding and converting various video-formats to other formats. For a complete overview see the transcoding website.

As player on my SX1 I use 'Smartmovie' with the XVid-Codec. I did not find any other good players (mobiclip didn't work).

So, to be able to watch Simpsons-episodes (22min, xvid) on my phone, I use this sequence of transcode operations to convert a ~170MB episode (XVid in avi) to a ~45MB big file:
(Of course, you have to replace $FILE with the right filename. The output file will be named SX1-movie.avi.)

nice -n +19 transcode --print_status 5 --export_fps 15 -Z 208x156 -x mplayer -J modfps=buffer=7,hqdn3d -V -i $FILE -y xvid,null -w 164 -o tmp-video.avi

nice -n +19 transcode --print_status 500 --export_fps 15 -u 35 -x null,auto -y null,wav -m tmp-sound.avi -i $FILE

nice -n +19 transcode --print_status 500 -p tmp-sound.avi -J astat=alog -u 50

nice -n +19 transcode --print_status 50 -i tmp-video.avi -o SX1-movie.avi -p tmp-sound.avi -s `cat alog` -P1 -b 64 -y raw

rm tmp-sound.avi
rm tmp-video.avi

ENJOY

SX1: Optimizing videos with Transcode

nospam@example.com (n00dl3s) — Mon, 06 Dec 2004 01:44:00 +0100

The SX1 has quite enough power under the hood to watch movies in reasonable quality. However, the framerate isn't high enough to enjoy fast action movies, but it's perfect for my favourite TV-Show: The Simpsons.

Let's see how it's done:
With transcode you have almost unlimited possibilities in En/Decoding and converting various video-formats to other formats. For a complete overview see the transcoding website.

As player on my SX1 I use 'Smartmovie' with the XVid-Codec. I did not find any other good players (mobiclip didn't work).

So, to be able to watch Simpsons-episodes (22min, xvid) on my phone, I use this sequence of transcode operations to convert a ~170MB episode (XVid in avi) to a ~45MB big file:
(Of course, you have to replace $FILE with the right filename. The output file will be named SX1-movie.avi.)

nice -n +19 transcode --print_status 5 --export_fps 15 -Z 208x156 -x mplayer -J modfps=buffer=7,hqdn3d -V -i $FILE -y xvid,null -w 164 -o tmp-video.avi

nice -n +19 transcode --print_status 500 --export_fps 15 -u 35 -x null,auto -y null,wav -m tmp-sound.avi -i $FILE

nice -n +19 transcode --print_status 500 -p tmp-sound.avi -J astat=alog -u 50

nice -n +19 transcode --print_status 50 -i tmp-video.avi -o SX1-movie.avi -p tmp-sound.avi -s `cat alog` -P1 -b 64 -y raw

rm tmp-sound.avi
rm tmp-video.avi

ENJOY

SX1 and kbluetoothd discovery jobs

nospam@example.com (n00dl3s) — Mon, 06 Dec 2004 01:37:00 +0100

I've just been playing a little with kbluetoothd's dicovery jobs. E.g. running scripts when a (specific) bluetooth device is in/out of range.

The possible use of this depends on what you want to do with it. Some basic hints (esp. for the SX1) can be found here...
To use this feature start up "kbluetoothd" and click your way to the "configure services" option, then click on the tab named "Device Discovery". You can "Add New Job" which gives you these possibilities (atm):

Custom Job

Discovery Protocol

Kopete_AutoAway

Photo Copy

Screensaver

Custom Job
This is a template do use for your own scripts. Unmodified it just displays a small popup-window whenever a device is discovered.

Discovery Protocol
This is essentially the same output as doing a "sdptool browse" from the shell. The protocols are by default saved as hmtl-files (name equals the MAC-Address of the discovered device) in /tmp

Kopete_AutoAway
This one is quite handy. Whenever your phone (or other BT-device) gets out of range (or if BT switched off) Kopete (the KDE Instant-Messenger / IRC-client) will set you "Away" (if you enabled the "auto-away" option in kopete before).

Photo Copy
This is a script to automatically download Photos (or whatever) from the phone once it's discovered. The unchanged script looks for photos in '/Galerie/Fotos' and stores them locally in '/tmp' .

Screensaver
This will trigger your standard KDE-screensaver, either with or without locking it. You have to change the file to your liking.

SX1-Info
Once again, the BT-application on the SX1 proves to be very unstable and crashes often. I could minimize this trouble by fiddling with "Minimum time between two successive calls" and "Periodically update neighbor list". I've set the first one to 00:00:05 (5 secs) for each job, and the latter to 00:00:10 (10 secs).
Seems this is OK for the SX1 (read: crashes, but only sometimes )

SX1 and Linux: What's hot, what's not...

nospam@example.com (n00dl3s) — Fri, 03 Dec 2004 01:33:00 +0100

The following Information is meant to be helpful to anybody trying to get the "Siemens SX1" mobile phone working together with our favorite OS: Gentoo-Linux.

Of course, there shouldn't be many differences regarding other distributions. I will add relevant information about my experiences with my Debian system as soon as I get my hands on a second Bluetooth adapter. First, some words in general about the SX1 and about its bluetooth-functionality:

The SX1 is a great phone - I just love it and did not regret buying it. There are, however, some issues with it. For example there were and are stability issues. A firmware upgrade may help for specific problems, but even though it is a rare situation, you may experience crashes, freezes and hanging applications on your SX1. This is especially true for applications relying on bluetooth and the bluetooth-implementation itself. So, you will find out, that sometimes it's best to restart bluetooth or the phone if things are misteriously failing or show somewhat strange behaviour.

Another problem is the limitation to one bluetooth-connection at the same time (on the phone). This is not "bluetooth-limitation" in general, but seems to be true for all the chips to be found in mobile phones

What's working so far:

Pairing

Sending and receiving files

TCP-IP over Bluetooth

GnuBox

SyncML/Multisync (with some minor issues)

Bemused

P3NFS (but very slow)

SX1: TCP-IP over BlueTooth

nospam@example.com (n00dl3s) — Fri, 03 Dec 2004 01:14:00 +0100

With this howto you will be able to use TCP-IP over BlueTooth, access your local LAN or the internet without restrictions (the speed is limited to what BlueTooth can handle)

Getting TCP/IP to work is maybe going to be tricky. I ran into lots of trouble myself. So, if you expirience problems just don't give up and experiment a litte

Basics:
AFAIK this feature was never meant to be made public, but was instead used by Nokia-technicians to get remote access to phones while in development. That's probably the reason why there is no information to be found in official documents by i.e. Siemens or Nokia.

Anyway, after buying my SX1 I came across several websites saying it was possible to have TCP/IP working on certain Symbian/S60 phones (like the SX1 or the Nokia 6600). These websites provided much needed information (see links at the end of this section). Nevertheless, none of the sites totally matches my case here, so thats why I decided to put together this small howto.

To get this going you need:

A working BlueTooth-implementation on your computer

pppd to allow dial-in connections from the phone'

iptables set up to act as router / NAT on the 'Bluetooth-PC'

a nameserver to resolve the 'mrouter'-zone

Setup the pppd

Kernel-Options:

CONFIG_PPP=m
CONFIG_PPP_ASYNC=m
CONFIG_PPP_DEFLATE=m
CONFIG_PPP_BSDCOMP=m

If you don't have it in your kernel already recompile and reboot the machine with the new kernel. You don't have to load the modules manually, they'll get loaded automatically when needed.

You need to create a /etc/ppp/options file. Below you can see mine, see #comments for explanations.

noauth
local
modem
proxyarp
debug
ms-dns 192.168.0.254 # your DNS-Server
192.168.0.100:192.168.0.110 # First is the pppd server IP, second the one the phone gets

Iptables / NAT

Now you have to set up iptables for NAT, which is a easy and straightforward thing to do. Just issue two simple commands:

echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward
iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o ppp0 -j MASQUERADE

If you already have a ppp0 open (to dial in to your ISP) it has to be ppp1 (or X). Of course you can also have iptables act as a firewall, google for instructions if you don't know how to do that.
You can verifiy those settings with:

hal root # iptables -t nat -L
Chain PREROUTING (policy ACCEPT)
target prot opt source destination

Chain POSTROUTING (policy ACCEPT)
target prot opt source destination
MASQUERADE all -- anywhere anywhere

Chain OUTPUT (policy ACCEPT)
target prot opt source destination

The Nameserver

I use bind9 as my nameserver.

First you have to create a new file called 'db.mrouter'. My file looks like this:

# cat /etc/bind/db.mrouter

$ttl 38400
mrouter. IN SOA flux. flux.wg. (
2003051402
10800
3600
604800
38400 )

mrouter. IN NS flux.
wsockhost.mrouter. IN A 192.168.0.254
192.168.0.254.mrouter. IN PTR wsockhost

Here, 'flux' is the hostname of my server and '192.168.0.254' is its IP.

Starting the connection

Some tips before you start:

It seems that the kbemused-server is interfering with all this. so, if you see a kbluetoothd popup window that indicates your phone is connecting to the bemused-server, it's maybe a good idea to disable it first or to stop kbluetoothd alltogether (just switching channels does not work for me).

The SX1's BlueTooth application suxx. It seems that it doesn't crash totally, but rather partially sometimes, e.g. I can still transfer files to / from the phone, but getting TCP-IP to work fails sometimes for no obvious reason. The simplest approach to this is switching Bluetooth (on the phone) off and on again, maybe even restart the phone.

Then, at last, make sure the rfcomm devices you are about to use are created at first and are not already in use. To see current rfcomm activity run 'rfcomm' without arguments. You can "free" rfcomm devices with "rfcomm release OR).

Let's try . To enable the tcp-ip connection, you have to do this:

# sdptool add --channel=2 SP

Add the local bluetooth serial-port

# dund --listen --channel=2

Tell dund to listen for incoming ppp connections on the serial-port

# rfcomm connect 2 00:01:E3:2C:F9:61 2

This is crucial now: we try to establish a connection to the phones serial port (NOT the serial port we established locally). The phone will disconnect immediately but this is exactly what we want.
That is normal behaviour and results from how the "mrouter" application on the phone is working. If a bluetooth-device is trying to connect to the phone's serial port, the phone "remembers" the MAC address of the device, disconnects and then tries to establish a connection to that MAC address. If mrouter gets a nameserver from the pppd and if NAT is working, you are done. Watch the syslog for activity:

Dec 3 01:33:18 hal hcid[26480]: Bluetooth HCI daemon
Dec 3 01:33:18 hal hcid[26480]: Starting security manager 0
Dec 3 01:33:18 hal sdpd[26484]: Bluetooth SDP daemon
Dec 3 01:33:18 hal dund[26492]: Bluetooth DUN daemon
Dec 3 01:33:18 hal hcid[26480]: link_key_request (sba=00:10:DC:57:6D:BC, dba=00:01:E3:2C:F9
Dec 3 01:33:20 hal dund[26506]: New connection from 00:01:E3:2C:F9:61
Dec 3 01:33:20 hal pppd[26512]: pppd 2.4.1 started by root, uid 0
Dec 3 01:33:20 hal pppd[26512]: using channel 8
Dec 3 01:33:20 hal pppd[26512]: Using interface ppp0
Dec 3 01:33:20 hal pppd[26512]: Connect: ppp0 <--> /dev/rfcomm0
Dec 3 01:33:20 hal pppd[26512]: sent [LCP ConfReq id=0x1 ]
Dec 3 01:33:20 hal pppd[26512]: rcvd [LCP ConfReq id=0x1 omp>]
Dec 3 01:33:20 hal pppd[26512]: sent [LCP ConfAck id=0x1 omp>]
Dec 3 01:33:21 hal pppd[26512]: rcvd [LCP ConfAck id=0x1 ]
Dec 3 01:33:21 hal pppd[26512]: cbcp_lowerup
Dec 3 01:33:21 hal pppd[26512]: want: 2
Dec 3 01:33:21 hal pppd[26512]: sent [IPCP ConfReq id=0x1 Dec 3 01:33:21 hal pppd[26512]: sent [CCP ConfReq id=0x1 Dec 3 01:33:21 hal pppd[26512]: rcvd [IPCP ConfReq id=0x1 ]
Dec 3 01:33:21 hal pppd[26512]: sent [IPCP ConfNak id=0x1 ]
Dec 3 01:33:21 hal pppd[26512]: rcvd [IPCP ConfAck id=0x1 Dec 3 01:33:21 hal pppd[26512]: rcvd [CCP ConfRej id=0x1 Dec 3 01:33:21 hal pppd[26512]: sent [CCP ConfReq id=0x2]
Dec 3 01:33:21 hal pppd[26512]: rcvd [IPCP ConfReq id=0x2 ]
Dec 3 01:33:21 hal pppd[26512]: sent [IPCP ConfAck id=0x2 ]
Dec 3 01:33:21 hal pppd[26512]: found interface eth0 for proxy arp
Dec 3 01:33:21 hal pppd[26512]: local IP address 192.168.0.253
Dec 3 01:33:21 hal pppd[26512]: remote IP address 192.168.0.200
Dec 3 01:33:21 hal pppd[26512]: Script /etc/ppp/ip-up started (pid 26521)
Dec 3 01:33:21 hal pppd[26512]: Script /etc/ppp/ip-up finished (pid 26521), status = 0x0

Happy tcp-ip'ing