Phone to GNOME integration
By Osma on Wednesday 27 April 2005, 18:44 - Permalink
Since my new RAZR doesn't have Gammu-compatible IrDA, but does have a "standard" USB ACM connection as well as Bluetooth, I am in search of new solutions for synchronizing my Evolution calendar and hopefully managing my phonebook. This entry is where I'm collecting stuff, hopefully helping someone and even attracting a few helpful comments. Read on, please.
I've located the following programs:
Gammu
Works with many Nokia and Ericsson phones, but not with the Moto RAZR. Ugly as hell to interface to, due to bad command line and even worse documentation. However, if it did speak to Motos, the Wammu GUI might at least let me reorganise the phonebook correctly.
KMobiletools
KDE tool, connects wonderfully to the phone, but doesn't apparently support calendar information. Synchronising with the KDE address book is not very helpful to me, as my address book is in Evolution. Getting a backup out of the phone is still better than nothing, though. However, the claim of "synchronising" with the KDE address book is not quite correct - it does copy entries from the phone, but does nothing whatsoever about updating them if I change them on the computer. I have most of the entries three times now in KDE.
GNOME Phone Manager
Theoretically, this ought to be a good option for a GNOME user like me. I have not yet tested this, but Google finds nothing about RAZR support, and I can not find working FC3 binaries. The thought of building the whole bluetooth stack from source is not inviting.
Multisync
Looks promising as well, but as far as I can see, no one has made it work with either Evolution 2 or RAZR. If I'm not mistaken, I would probably need both G-P-M and Multisync to make this solution work.
Comment by Andr'e on Tue, 10 May 2005 11:54:27:
Hi, i don' t know if your RAZR is supported by multisync but multisync doesn't
need G-P-M and syncs pretty well with Evolution 2. Godd luck ;-)
Comment by Osma on Sat, 14 May 2005 21:49:43:
Thanks. Unfortunately, I've been unable to find a build of Multisync compatible
with Evolution 2.2 - rebuilding fails due to evolution-data-server 1.2. Might
be a trivial fix, but I haven't collected enough motivation to look at it.
Comment by Osma on Tue, 14 Jun 2005 11:49:46:
In fact, Multisync seems like an unbelievably difficult package to build. It
would take hours to even understand which version of it is _supposed_ to build,
given that the usuals tools don't work at all.
Comment by Justace Clutter on Sat, 23 Jul 2005 08:51:57:
Did you ever get this to work...
Comment by Osma on Sun, 24 Jul 2005 21:13:10:
Haven't had the time to muck with Multisync. I find it a bit tedious to use
software that doesn't have any packaged releases that are supposed to
work..
Comment by Osma on Wed, 27 Jul 2005 17:01:23:
Well, I finally installed the Multisync CVS version (hint, download the
snapshot archive instead of grabbing CVS head - the latter does not work), and
ended up with a version that will talk to Evo 2 - I can now make a backup, and
will try the SyncML-to-a-server plugin soon. However, the IrMC plugin will not
sync to RAZR via Bluetooth. I can discover the phone, and on channel 8 I even
get a dialog on the phone's screen about an incoming transfer, but that is
denied by the phone, and the connection fails. IrMC's "cable" option doesn't
support Motorola either. RAZR apparently does support SyncML too, but would
require me to be able to enter a server address - I don't know what my laptop's
address would be (localhost?)