Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Connecting a nokia n70 to Ubuntu 10 via usb

I've got some photos stored on a nokia n70 that I need to download to my laptop running Ubuntu 10, I have the usb cable ready so what happens when I connect it?

The Network Manager picks it up straight away as a mobile broadband device so it's looking good, but I don't need to use the phone to connect to the internet.. my Huawei usb dongle works straight out of the box with Ubuntu

To upload/download files to/from the Nokia n70 we need to use obexftp, it comes with a gui version called obextool so let's install them both:

sudo apt-get install obextool obexftp

I ran obextool straight away but it didn't work out of the box with the nokia for some reason.. so let's use obexftp to see if it can pick up the phone:

sudo obexftp -u
Found 2 USB OBEX interfaces


0 (Manufacturer: Nokia Product: Nokia N70 Serial: (null) Interface description: SYNCML-SYNC)
1 (Manufacturer: Nokia Product: Nokia N70 Serial: (null) Interface description: PC Suite Services)


Use '-u interface_number' to connect

It's found the phone, let's see if it can connect and list the drives on the phone (internal and memory card):

sudo obexftp -u 1 -l
Connecting..\done
Tried to connect for 16ms
Receiving "(null)"...|<?xml version="1.0"?>
<folder-listing version="1.0">
   <folder name="C:" user-perm="RW" mem-type="DEV" label="Phone memory"/>
   <folder name="E:" user-perm="RW" mem-type="MMC" label="Memory card"/>
</folder-listing>
Disconnecting../done

Success!

The obextool gui had trouble connecting before, so let's tell it how to connect:

sudo obextool --obexcmd "obexftp -u 1"

I can now download the images from my nokia n70 to my Ubuntu desktop:




I hope somebody finds this useful.. please make a comment if you have any questions

3 comments:

  1. Hi!

    Thanks for this guide, I followed it and I was able to explore the phone.

    Just a question: if I try to delete a folder, Obextool says me that I've not selected the file/folder (obviously it's not true).

    Is it normal?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hello,

    Thank you for posting, I'm glad you found the guide useful.

    Obextool should be able to delete a directory when you select it as long the directory is empty, I'd try deleting all of the files in the directory first then try deleting the directory.

    If it still won't delete through Obextool after deleting all the files in the directory, then try obexftp from the command line to delete the folder:

    obexftp -u 1 --delete DIRECTORY

    Let me know how it goes!

    ReplyDelete
  3. great it worked for me
    Thanks for the guide

    Regards
    chandu

    ReplyDelete