How to Use a Linux
PC to Send and Receive SMS Messages (Non-Developer's Perspective)
Sending
SMS messages with a mobile phone has a major problem -- it is very
time consuming to write a text message using the small keypad of a
mobile phone. Luckily, it is possible to use a PC (desktop or
notebook computer) to send and receive SMS messages. This way you can
use a full-sized QWERTY keyboard to write text messages.
In
this article, we will demonstrate how to send and receive SMS
messages on a PC that runs Linux. This article was written for
non-developers. But SMS application developers who plan to use Gnokii
to handle low-level details of SMS messaging in their Linux
application should also benefit from this article, especially from
the sections that detail how to install and configure Gnokii on
Linux. More information about SMS application development is
available in our SMS tutorial.
Requirements for
Sending and Receiving SMS Messages from a Linux PC via a Mobile Phone
Here
are the requirements for sending and receiving SMS messages through a
mobile phone using a Linux PC:
A
mobile phone that can be connected to your PC (some mobile phones do
not have an interface for connecting to a PC). Today, most mobile
phones support at least one of the following options to connect to a
PC:
The
infrared and Bluetooth option should be very useful to many notebook
computer users since nowadays many notebook computers have built-in
infrared or Bluetooth support.
A
Linux program that can control the mobile phone to send and receive
SMS messages
Usually
the program for sending and receiving SMS messages can be downloaded
free of charge from the web sites of mobile phone manufacturers. For
example, Nokia offers a software package called Nokia PC Suite that
can be used to send/receive SMS messages, read/write phone book
entries, and manage images, music and other files, among other
features. Unfortunately, most mobile phone manufacturers only provide
such programs for the Microsoft Windows platform.
To
solve this problem, some programmers came together to develop open
source replacements of such mobile phone software. One of the more
mature ones is Gnokii, which is already included in some Linux
distributions such as Debian, Mandriva Linux (old name: Mandrake
Linux) and SUSE Linux. In the following sections, we will provide
further details about Gnokii and demonstrate how to use Gnokii to
send and receive SMS messages on your Linux PC.
(Two
alternatives to Gnokii for sending and receiving SMS messages are
Gammu and gsmlib. More information about them can be found in our
article "Free Software/Tools and
Libraries for Sending and Receiving SMS Messages with a Computer /
PC".)
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