sms-related things i learned tonight

[tech]

posted by tom / February 21, 2006 /

1. Gnokii is a predecessor to Gammu. I thought it was the other way around.


2. Gnokki can't deal with sending or receiving text messages on my Ericsson T39, although it does recognize it.


3. Gammu can! But it only does it once, then the phone gets stuck and has to be reset. Got a mail into the Gammu user list, but no ideas at the moment on why this happens. Definitely need this resolved, though.


4. Gammu's SMS daemon (smsd) is kind of slick, and gets around the "can only do something once" problem (sort of). But it can't consistently send outgoing SMS properly, even though the command line Gammu can — is this because I'm using a Sidekick SIM, with all of its weird limitations? Maybe. And why does sending SMS from my WIND SIM work consistently, but not transmit any text aside from the phone number? So many questions.


5. Even if I can't send SMS, that's okay, because Teleflip exists. Receiving is the thing, and that works fine. Still...


6. My Linux machine is all kinds of screwed up. The permissions on the serial port reset on every reboot (thanks SELinux, you stupid piece of shit), I'm going to have to configure Sendmail anyway to work with Teleflip, and it's littered with miscellaneous crap since I have no idea how to uninstall things under Linux that don't support make uninstall. A reformat is in order before deploying this still-shrouded-in-mystery SMS app. Arg.


7. The T39 serial cable doesn't charge the battery all of the time, but does charge it some of the time. Maybe just when it's being polled? Anyway, it's frustratingly stupid, but hopefully will be good enough. Otherwise I'll have to build some kind of horrible serial port adapter that adds charge to the appropriate pins (and I'll probably have to ruin my charger to do it). Bah!


8. All in all, this is surpringly frustrating given that other people have reported success with an identical configuration.


9. I remember enough Italian to recharge my SIM at Wind's website, but without an Italian address they won't process my credit card. Suck. I wanted to hang on to that number.

So the best case scenario is that the Gammu guys fix my problem for me, and I just have to rebuild the Linux box (which was on my to-do list anyway). Worst case is, I suppose, that I spin my wheels wrestling with weirdness caused by my SK SIM, then finally give up and buy another cheap phone off Ebay and get a rechargeable SIM.

Alright. So that's a plan, at least. I'm glad we had this talk.