Re: [Opensync-users] Plugin for gnokii

[Matthew K. <m_...@fa...>]

Thanks for all your comments and help, Eduardo.


> Do you know which protocol does gnokii implement, to access your phone?

It uses a serial protocol to communicate with the phone directly, I
think. This can be over Bluetooth, Infrared or cable. See
http://www.gnokii.org/ for more details.

My motivation is that I want to synchronise my Nokia 6670 phone over
bluetooth. This requires a TCP/IP connection with the phone, though -
see
http://multisync.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php?Nokia6600Instructions
for a description of the overall process. Setting up a TCP/IP connection
over bluetooth with modern Nokia Series 60 phones (see 6600, 6620, 7610,
6670, 6260, 3230, 6630, 6680) requires a bit of messing around with a
piece of software called Gnubox which you need to install on the phone
in order to set up a suitable access point (the phone software is
intentionally crippled so you can't do this, presumably to encourage
users to use GSM/CDMA internet access rather than connecting to
something cheaper over bluetooth).

I had no success with this. Apparently people have got it to work. See
the gnubox website (http://gnubox.dnsalias.org/gnubox/) and fora
(http://www.symbianos.org/yabbse/index.php?board=2). However, it's a
messy business since the authors have to make changes for each new phone
that comes out, and requires you to manually initiate a sync even when
it does work.

The gnokii approach, on the other hand, is to have a server-client
architecture. Their Symbian .sis file is called GNAPPLET and can be run
on any of the Nokia Series 60 phones, for which a consistent API is
provided (so they update it for new features they've implemented, not
compatibility with new phones). Recent development means you can simply
run it in the background on your phone (no timeout) and make remote
requests to it. Since I rarely turn my phone off, this is perfect for
me. I can make requests from my laptop like 'gnokii --getphonebook ME 1
end -v' which gets all contact entries from the phone and dumps them out
into a VCARD. Without that -v switch, it gives the output I gave earlier
in the thread. And I can script these for daily backups, for instance. 

I forget that the server/client business and can interact with my phone
very naturally without manually initiating anything on the phone side.
It would be amazing if I could use this method to synchronise - the
benefits of automation are obvious. The downside is that this is not an
actual syncing protocol, but the Opensync architecture looked like it
might be able to accomodate the Gnokii style of doing things, since
Opensync does so much synchronisation itself.


> It should work. But currently, the only problem is: if you change the data
> on your phone, additional fields on the other device (i.e. on evolution),
> will be dropped and your item on evolution will be replaced by the
> "less rich" version from your phone.
> 
> To avoid this, we need to implement a feature called "merging", that is
> not supported by opensync, yet.

This is really important, I think. It would be a shame to lose any
information. Especially since Gnokii interfaces not just with Nokia
Series 60 phones, but also with more basic phones such as the Nokia
Series 30 (e.g. 3210) and Series 40 (e.g. 6100) phones, which are less
feature-rich than the Series 60 phones. 

This presents many problems, some of which need to be fixed on the
Gnokii side. The Gnokii project is rooted in the less modern phones
rather than the Series 60 'smartphones', so there is not yet support for
(e.g.) end dates in appointments, which screws things up as far as
Evolution goes, since it will throw a wobbly at an appointment without
an End date, and it's a bit pointless to assign an arbitrary one.

However, the contact information is rich enough - this would be a good
starting point.


> The number at the top would be the UID your plugin would report. 

Makes sense!

> The group id could be translated to a category, when converting the data to
> a known format.

Likewise, makes sense.


Hope that info has been of use - good luck with the merging stuff. I
think that the utility of this plugin is contingent on that working, but
I'll get working on what I can in the meantime. Are you planning that
for the Beta release, by the way?


Best wishes,
Matt