My Chinese made Mobile Phone | Adevnture with Linux Mobile Tools

Recently I purchased a new Chinese made GSM Mobile Phone by Microtech. It is ¨ MT6227 MTK1 Media Player¨ , a rather funny named but nice looking GSM mobile phone .I like it because it offers so many functions than my previous ancient Nokia 66010i mobile phone. But beauty always brings problems with it ! So did my new Chinese made moobile phone.

It was a great mystry for me how to access it and update and customize my various data as the Chinese did not bother to pack a PC suite software CD with my set . Even their website does not offer any download link for this software.

Windows mounted it as a mass storage device and I could only access the ¨memory card ¨ data . I found a software called ¨PCSyncManager¨ with USB driver for my mobile phone but after full ¨normal¨ installation it refused to access my phone.

So it was time to look around for some open source alternatives on my Linux system. Searching on synaptic I found gammu and wammu and I immediately installed them on my PCLinuxOS . Through online search I found about a kde project known as KmobileTools but unfortunately PCLinuxOS repositories did not contain this package.

Kurumin NG 8.06 was a pleasant surprize because I could get both the gammu/wammu and KmoblieTools easily from the repositories .

Gammu & Wammu

Gammu is mobile phone manager running on Linux. The communication is made by Gammu library. Wammu is a Mobile phone manager using Gammu as it's backend.

It was easy to configure and browse my phone book,messages ,contacts and calender. Wammu worked flawlessly to work around and clean various menus on my phone.

KmoblieTools

KmobileTools work similarly with few additional fuctions like signals levels and battery levels.

GmobileMedia

gMobileMedia is a simple GTK based tool used to browse and handle a mobile phone filesystem. You can easily upload and download images, ringtones, photos, and applications to & from your mobile phone through a data cable . I installed gMobileMedia from synaptic but unfortunaely it did not support my mobile phone.

Mount as a ¨mass storage media¨

My mobile fone can be easily mounted just like any storage media e.g a flash drive and I can upload and download different files to and from my computer to my mobile phone.

I was really disappointed to purchase a chinese mobile phone initially because I thought I could never access it and modify or retrieve its contents. But just a little effort and search on Linux gave me so many options to enjoy and customize my mobile phone and I am really enjoying it now.Thanks to Open Source and GNU/Linux :)

Simplis GNU/Linux: A new face in GNU/Linux Town

We see many new Linux distributions released on regular basis. Some are based upon already existing major Linux distributions while others are independent projects. But not all will attract your attention until there is something really unique about them.

I read about the new release (Vixta.org 3D 9.03) of Vixta.org which is an easy-to-use, Fedora-based distribution with a user interface that resembles Window$ Vista. In the live session of
Vixta.org I ran Firefox and off the tradition and routine the home page was set on a flash based cool looking website LINUX Technology than on Vixta.org. Out of curiosity I browsed around the various menus as I thought the Vixta.org has migrated to a new home page despite the fact that the home page of Vixta.org is same as before. Browsing through the pages I came to realize that this is in fact a new Linux project which is being promoted by Vixta.org: what is the relationship between the two is still not clear to me.

The LINUX Technology website defines only the basic about this new distribution at the moment .This project is run by Portuguese & Swiss IT Professors, IT Engineers and IT Students. They call themselves as “a group of Open Source Addicts “and define the aims and objectives of their project in very simple words :

“We all think the way UP to spread LINUX Technology is to make it SIMPLE! “

So this clarifies the rationale of choosing the name “Simplis” for this distribution. They further extend the aims of this project by stating that they strive for these two goals :

FREE and SIMPLE: This is the main goal of simplis!
Everybody should "play" with it, from sysadmins to Desktop users!

SECURE and FAST: The other 2 main goals!
Secure: LINUX TECHNOLGY doesn’t suffer from virus and instability!
Fast: 5 min to INSTALL!

So as I stated in the start some “uniqueness” about a new Linux distribution will make you stop and look into details about it.

Let’s take a brief look into Simplis Linux here.

Since their website does not tell much about Simplis Linux I emailed the Simplis people and asked what is Simplis based upon and whether it is a sister project of Vixta.org ? A. Paulo Santos from LINUX Technology is kind enough to reply back and inform me that it is based upon Fedora with KDE 4.0 and that these two are different project in fact. .

Simplis is currently offering simplis 9.0.1 Eng CD & DVD ISO which can be downloaded from simplis sourceforge.net page.

LiveDVD Session

The Live DVD ran smoothly and all my system’s hardware was configured properly without any errors. The Simplis desktop is typical desktop of latest Vixta.org 3D 9.03 with the graphics added by Simplis team which make it look more appealing to eyes. Multimedia and Internet work out of the box on Live session.


3D Desktop ScreenShot


Installation

It is a straight forward Fedora installation with anaconda installer and upon reboot all the Windows FAT32 & NTFS partitions are auto mounted without the need to edit fstab.


So what is good about Simplis?

It offers all the fedora 9 packages with KDE 4.0.5 and Multimedia and all the other packages included by default to facilitate home users to use Simplis out of the box both as Live and installed system.

Problem I faced with Simplis

I had to install the Livna repository manually and upon the command su -c 'yum update' in shell I would get repeated error of failure to load update from mirrors and yum would start looking for another mirror. Another problem I faced that some mirrors would do get the updates but then I would get the error that package md5sums is not matching. Since I am not a Fedora guy I was literally lost what kind of error this is.


Overall Impression

For the first public release of Simplis it is almost a perfectly stable distribution with some small issues with package management which I think can be easily fixed.

Relationship with Vixta.org

I personally feel that Simplis team has adopted Vixta.org as base and added their own graphics and included the commonly used packages and multimedia support so that the end users don’t have to worry getting these later. There is an additional point to note here that Simplis team has avoided saying that Simplis resembles in looks to Window$ which identifies them from Vixta.org. I will recommend Simplis to those who want to have Fedora system with everything working out of the box.

Virus : A paralysed object on GNU/Linux

Recently I faced two incidents when I had to format my flash drive as it would simply refuse to open at all just because it was infected with some nasty viruses ( New Folder.exe Virus ) from my office computers.

Both of the times I lost all my data in the flash because the viruses in it were so nasty that the Avast Pro antivirus on my Window$ totally refused to open it or let me scan it and I was only left with one choice : format my poor little flash drive. After formatting it I had to run R-Studio Network edition data recovery software to retrieve my data. So it was a mess, a frustration and a waste of time .

When for the third the same event hit me, suddenly it sparked in my mind that if there is any solution available to retrieve my data without formatting my flash is to open it in PCLinuxOS.

It was an amazing experience. My drive was picked up and opened up promptly on PCLinuxOS and along with my data files I could see some weird looking files lying around and staring at me with blank eyes! Out of rage and hatred that was flowing through my veins for those nasty virus files because of the sufferings they put on me twice , I just cut and pasted them into a new folder on desktop to deal with them later .

First I copied all my data and saved it at proper place and then went to fix the nasty creatures. Since I have installed Clam AntiVirus on my PCLinuxOS so I scanned my flash drive with it and once it was all clear I safely removed it : it was a rescue this time from yet another format of the poor little flash!

What did I do with those nasty little creatures who would bite me on my carotids in Windwo$ and were looking at me with the looks of "have mercy on us " in PCLinuxOS !

Well, I scanned them , and guaranteed them with Clam AntiVirus and when still my fury and anger was not pacified I shredded them with shredder mercilessly!

Revenge taken, justice done to the innocent looking little evils, thanks to my PCLinuxOS :)