Hacking my mobile

I already told you about my new Siemens MC60 mobile. I quickly discovered how expensive it is to download ringtones and wallpapers by WAP or SMS. So I decided to buy a data-cable to connect the phone to my computer, for which I payed an outrageous 47 Euro, but I guess in the long run it'll be worth it. Now, the cable came with a Windows utility set and driver, but I soon hated the occasional reboot to download pictures from the phone's camera, so a Linux solution had to be found.

In Windows, the Siemens utility used a kind of serial over USB connection, so I knew I had to use the usbserial drivers of Linux. After some Googling, I found out that most Siemens mobile phones use the pl2303 driver. Two kernel compilations later (one for the driver, the other because I forgot to include ohci-hcd), my computer successfully created the /dev/ttyUSB0 device when I plugged in the datacable.

Apt-cache search siemens told me that scmxx was a nice command line utility to talk to the Siemens phone, and indeed, it worked, though it only seemed to like to exchange phonebooks and SMS messages. No chance in downloading some camera pictures. So I searched some more and discovered SieFS, a fusermount extension which enabled me to mount my mobile''s filesystem (apparently a 2 MB vfat compact flash card) on my computer. After that, all was plain easy.

Anonymous Wed, 06/15/2005 - 19:19

Cool. But don't worry about the price of the data cable. It's worth it : ringtones are just MIDI files, and backgrounds come free from many sites. Check out siemensinfo.de for hours of fun ;)

Anonymous Wed, 06/15/2005 - 19:26

There's a Sourceforge site about Siefs too, but all redirects to the original site, which gives a 503. Here's a site with the source - and a .deb package !

http://skawina.eu.org/siefs