Configuration of gnokii

If the bluetooth connection works, you can go on to configure gnokii. You need to edit the file /etc/gnokiirc. These are the important lines:

[global]
port = {BD address of the phone}
model = 6510
initlength = default
connection = bluetooth

The other entries in this file can be left on their default values.

Now you can use gnokii --identify to check if gnokii can connect to the phone. It should display the phone model and its IMEI.

I have searched for plugins for multisync or multisynk but have not found anything, so until now I have found no way to synchronize the calender data, todo list, etc.

Problems when connecting to the phone

Sometimes there is a problem connecting the phone and the PC. The phone asks for a password, but you can enter what you want, the phone does not get the connection. This is caused by the configuration of the hci daemon, that wants to ask for the PIN on the pc, but is not permitted to do that (it tries to display a window on the user desktop but has no right to do that as root). This problem shows up with entries like

hcid[6618]: PIN helper exited abnormally with code 256

in the file /var/log/syslog.

The workaround is to write a simple shell script that provides a pin to the hci daemon. It reads the pin simply from the file /etc/bluetooth/pin and passes it to hcid :

#!/bin/bash

PIN=`cat /etc/bluetooth/pin\`
echo PIN:$PIN

The script should be saved as /usr/local/bin/bluepin. Then you need to change the configuration file /etc/bluetooth/hcid.conf to tell it to use this script:

pin_helper /usr/local/bin/bluepin;

Then, after restarting the bluez utils with /etc/init.d/bluez-utils restart the connection should work with the pin entered in /etc/bluetooth/pin.

Synchronizing the KDE Addressbook

There is an easy way to transfer the contents of the KDE Addressbook to the mobile phone. In the KDE Addressbook there is implemented an interface to gnokii. Click on the menu point File -> Export. There is the entry "Export to Mobile Phone". It uses the library libgnokii to transfer the address data to the phone.

If you do not want to transfer all entries to the phone, you can mark some entries with a category and export only these entries to the phone.

Be sure not to overwrite important data in your phone. The addressbook application does not check if an entry in your phone has changed and will overwrite it with the data from the KDE Addressbook.