Python via bluetooth console with Nokia S60 and openSUSE 11.0

If you have a Nokia S60 smartphone, you can install python on it and mess about with it. There is quite a bit of documentation on the Nokia developers site on this and there are lots of applications already hosted on the python for S60 wiki. What I found was lacking, was a good description of how to get a bluetooth console set up so that you can type commands on your linux pc and have them executed on the phone and the results displayed on the PC (quasi ssh-like). The official wiki has a howto at http://wiki.opensource.nokia.com/projects/PyS60_Bluetooth_console but even that seems to lack self-confidence and points to a 'better description' at http://crschmidt.net/blog/11/bluetooth-console/ (it really is better).

After trying out a number of tools and making tonnes of mistakes, here's what I did to finally get it working on openSUSE 11.0 (make sure that hcitool, sdptool, rfcomm, screen are installed - and I take it for granted that you have already installed and setup python on the phone itself - if not, go to http://sourceforge.net/projects/pys60/ )

• hciconfig reset
• hcitool dev
• sdptool add --channel=2 SP
• rfcomm listen rfcomm2 2

The last command Waiting for connection on channel 2
should output something like:

Waiting for connection on channel 2

Now open python on the phone. One of the options from the start 'options' is 'bluetooth console'. Choose the bluetooth console and follow the instructions (it will basically only ask you to select the bluetooth connection to use - typically your PC/Laptop. You can save the choice as 'default' if you like.) Once this is done, in the console where you typed the last command (rfcomm listen rfcomm2 2), you should now see:

Connection from 00:14:A7:8B:6A:A0 to /dev/rfcomm2
Press CTRL-C for hangup

Now open up another console and type:

screen /dev/rfcomm2

If everything went right, you should now have a python console. This python console is actually running on your phone - anything you type in will be executed on the phone. This makes developing python for Nokia S60 a cinch.

SGI FreeB and FLOSS

The FSF published a news flash about SGI's update to their FreeB license, to version 2.0. Whereas the FSF were aware of the issue since January 2008, our team here at Novell had pinpointed this issue numerous times back as far as 2005. The FSF wrote:

In January of 2008, software code at the heart of GNU/Linux 3D applications was discovered to be non-free—a potential disaster for free software advocates hoping to see advanced graphical acceleration now common on modern operating systems.

The new version of the license is in the style of the MIT license - one of the most liberal licenses available. As such, SGI has made their contributions to projects GPL compatible (the X11/MIT license is compatible with every version of the GPL). This is definitely good news. Thanks to SGI.

Gwenview for KDE4 is really impressive

Up until today, I wasn't too impressed with the KDE's image viewers. Sure there are apps like digikam which serve as a kind of swiss army knife for messing abaht wiv photos. Then there was gwenview (which doesn't even have an obligatory k in the name and always runs the risk of being sorted in with the gnome apps). Gwenview under KDE3 was a bit of a strange beast. I could never really get the hang of it, but in the absence of anything else, used it to quickly open images.

Today I messed about with the KDE4 version of Gwenview. Wicked!!!! They've thought up some really cool and really innovative stuff. Maybe nothing absolutely groundbreaking, but I found the user interface really self explanatory and best of all, it doesn't get in my way like so many other apps. Really well done to the Gwenview team!