Infrared on Nokia Communicator and Linux

By AhmedGeneral

Though the camera on my Communicator is surprisingly good, I never got around to using it on a regular basis, mainly due to the hassles of transferring the images. I would have to email them as attachments to my email account (through WiFi off course) and then transfer them back to the laptop from my email server. That is, until now.

I tried getting infrared to work on Linux a couple of times before, but never very seriously or successfully. Last night, I was in no mood to work or do anything else so started playing with IrDA utils on the Ubuntu Dapper Linux installed on my laptop. At first, irdadump started to show some output, including some details of my Nokia Communicator 9500 when I tried to “beam” a file over. This in itself was a promising sign, but I couldn’t get past an error message saying something about the “IrDA:IrOBEX” class not being available.

Then I installed the openobex-apps package from the Ubuntu repositories and also discovered this howto. Everything worked very nicely when I followed these simple steps (as root):

  • Ran irattach irda0 -s (probably don’t need to do this if irattach is already running)
  • Ran irobex_palm3 and let it wait for receiving files
  • On the phone, chose to send the selected images via Infrared
  • Found the files saved in /tmp/

For some reason, I’m still unabled to send a file to the phone from my laptop, but I can’t remember the last time I needed to do this, so by the time I get around to troubleshooting this, Infrared may just be obsolete.

Here’s a cute photo of a fat cat that has made it a habit to sleep on the guard’s chair outside the office every night. I tried to snap it before, but it would run away when we switched on the lights. It seems to have become lazier now or doesn’t mind the intrusion as much as before.

Fat Cat on a chair

The quality of still shots like this one seems quite acceptable. Better than the 1.2 Megapixel 6680 that I used to have. And no, I still haven’t bought a proper camera, though I really should get one soon (even if it isn’t a Canon). Am missing lots of outdoor shooting opportunities simply because of this.

5 thoughts on “Infrared on Nokia Communicator and Linux”

  2. Awesome, next puzzle have you been able to sync your contacts with your address book in Ubuntu? or have you found a solution to save your contacts. I had faced the problem when I had the 9300 (until it was stolen) then I used to dual boot to XP and save stuff there – but now I rarely dual boot so the problem will exist once i get a new cell either a JASJAM or the Sony P990i.

    Any solutions? sometimes I think about keeping an address book online but where?

  3. Teeth Maestro, I haven’t tried it yet, but it’s on my list of things to do. Not high priority, admittedly, but I lost all my contacts from my last phone when it broke so I should start sync’ing this data.

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