Installing Gnokii / XGnokii

Installing Gnokii / XGnokii on Linux

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Gnokii / XGnokii is already included in some Linux distributions. For example, Debian, Mandriva Linux (old name: Mandrake Linux) and SUSE Linux. If you are using such Linux distributions, you can simply install Gnokii / XGnokii (e.g. from CD/DVD) according to the usual package installation procedure of the Linux distribution. Otherwise you can download the latest source tarball from Gnokii's web site, then compile and install it.

Here are the steps for installing Gnokii / XGnokii from source. We are using Fedora Core 5 and Gnokii 0.6.14.

1. Go to http://www.gnokii.org/downloads.shtml to download Gnokii's source tarball.

2. Extract the downloaded file using the tar command.

For a gzip-compressed file, use the following command line:

# tar -xzf gnokii-0.6.14.tar.gz

For a bzip2-compressed file, use the following command line:

# tar -xjf gnokii-0.6.14.tar.bz2

3. Go into the gnokii-0.6.14 directory that contains the extracted files.

# cd gnokii-0.6.14

4. Execute the configure script inside the gnokii-0.6.14 directory by the following command line:

# ./configure

The configure script supports many options. Two commonly used ones are --enable-security and --prefix.

The --enable-security option is used to enable security-related features of Gnokii. If you do not use the --enable-security option with the configure script, you will not be able to use the options --entersecuritycode, --getsecuritycode and --getsecuritycodestatus with Gnokii after installation. (The Gnokii option --entersecuritycode is used to set security codes such as the SIM PIN and SIM PUK. --getsecuritycode is used to retrieve security codes. --getsecuritycodestatus is used to check whether the mobile device requires security codes to operate.)

# ./configure --enable-security

The --prefix option is used to specify the installation prefix. If the installation prefix is not specified, the default prefix /usr/local will be used and files will be installed in directories such as /usr/local/bin, /usr/local/include, /usr/local/lib, /usr/local/sbin and /usr/local/share. Here is an example that specifies the installation prefix to /usr:

# ./configure --prefix=/usr

To see the complete list of configure script options and some brief descriptions about them, use the following command line:

# ./configure --help

5. Compile the source code:

make

6. If you are not root, switch to root using the su command:

# su

7. Start the installation process:

# make install

8. Install Gnokii's documentation:

# make install-docs

Installing Gnokii's gnapplet on Symbian OS

To enable Gnokii to communicate with a Symbian mobile phone through the gnapplet driver, you must install a small program called gnapplet on your Symbian OS. The sis file of gnapplet, gnapplet.sis, can be found in the gnokii-version/utils directory of the extracted source tarball, where version is the version of Gnokii you are using. As we are using Gnokii 0.6.14, the file gnapplet.sis is located at the gnokii-0.6.14/utils directory. Transfer this sis file to your mobile phone and then install it like other Symbian software. Since gnapplet is an open source program, you can download its source code from Gnokii's web site if you are interested in it.

The reason that gnapplet has to be installed is because the developers of Gnokii decided to use their own protocol for the communication between the PC and the Symbian mobile phone. This way the developers need not to care about how the original protocol works. Their design is like this: gnapplet acts as the server. It is started first and waits for requests from Gnokii. Gnokii acts as the client. It sends requests to gnapplet, which will do the actual work. Here is an example: to send an SMS text message, Gnokii sends a request to gnapplet. The request contains information such as the recipient mobile number and the body of the text message. After receiving the request, gnapplet will instruct the mobile phone to send the SMS message out.

If your Symbian mobile phone supports AT commands, you can configure Gnokii to use the AT driver instead of the gnapplet driver. This way you do not have to install any programs on Symbian OS.

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