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Linux to Symbian File Transfer – HOWTO

I finally got to see my phone’s filesystem from Linux this morning! I used p3nfs to connect my Nokia 7650 and Red Hat 9 Linux box. Here’s how.

  • Login to your Linux box as root.
  • Make sure you have the following rpms installed: bluez-libs-devel, bluez-libs, bluez-utils. They’re available from your local apt-rpm repository (just apt-get install them!) or from http://bluez.sf.net
  • Copy the following lines to your /etc/modules.conf

    # bluetooth stuff
    alias net-pf-31 bluez
    alias bt-proto-0 l2cap
    alias bt-proto-2 sco
    alias bt-proto-3 rfcomm

  • Start Bluetooth services: /etc/init.d/bluetooth start
  • Create the bluetooth device if it doesn’t exist: mknod /dev/rfcomm0 c 216 0
  • Create a directory for the mobile to be mounted on: mkdir /mnt/psion
  • Download p3nfs from the site above. Copy the nfsapp for your phone to your phone (you’ll have to mail it to your phone, wap, or bluetooth in Windows.)
  • p3nfsd doesn’t compile on Red Hat 9, but it’s simple to fix that. cd into the nfsd directory, edit “mp_mount.c” and remove any mention of extern int errno from it and add #include <errno.h> at the top of the file. Do the same in “mp_xmit.c” and compile using make clean;make
  • Follow the instructions in README.bluetooth.linux (find the BDADDR, bind to the device, and start the nfs app and servers.
  • cd into /mnt/psion and look around your phone!

This is in fact more useful than the Windows tools I have. I couldn’t send images from my phone to my desktop software, and there’s quite a few of them. Using this, I simply went into /mnt/psion/C:/Nokia/Images/ and “mv”ed the files onto my PC!
There’s an “Installs” directory there too so I presume that’s where the .sis and .jar files go to install applications. Will test later. /me’s happy!
This howto wouldn’t have been possible without the invaluable page Tom wrote about his own experiences. Thanks! And of course Google helped me compile p3nfsd!