Mobile phones

FUSE, the userspace mount utility in Linux, is prepping itself for inclusion into the main Linux kernel. Hence the last upgrade to Fuse 2.2. This version was recently introduced into the Debian unstable branch, which made it onto my computer after the last apt-get dist-upgrade. However, I noticed that the combination with siefs, the Siemens filesystem driver, refused to work after the Fuse upgrade :

# fusermount /mnt/usb siefs /dev/ttyUSB0
fusermount: old style mounting not supported

which was very annoying, cause I couldn't download the pictures I took with my mobile camera any more. The solution was to upgrade to siefs 0.5, and to kernel 2.6.11. Mounting the device with fusermount still isn't possible, but the regular mount works like a charm :

# mount -t siefs /dev/ttyUSB0 /mnt/usb

The neat little mobile in the snapshot box is the Sony Ericsson T100, which I bought for my girlfriend M. Mobile phones are so cheap nowadays; I recently saw a Siemens GSM for only 50 Euro ! What a difference with 5 years ago, when I bought my first (Kenwood) mobile : 150 Euros for a phone that was 6 times heavier, had only SMS features, and the battery was dead after 3 days...

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.

This (Siemens MC60) is my new cellphone. Color screen, integrated camera, WAP, GPRS and Java (what, no Perl ?).

Oh, and you can call someone with it too ;)