Nokia 6300 and Linux

THE EASY PART

Hooking up
Well, I got my Nokia hooked up to my laptop. The cable was a standard camera cable that cost about 30zł. I plugged it into my HP Pavilion zv6000 running SuSE Linux 10.3. The Nokia told me I had a USB cable connected and asked me to "Select mode". I pressed OK. Then I was faced with a menu: 1. Nokia mode 2. Printing & media 3. Data storage. Cool! I chose Data storage, hoping it would give me access to my folders and files of my Nokia on my HP. POP! "127M removeable media" window appeared. I clicked Open in New Window. There they were! All of the contents of the 128M card of the Nokia. Don't ask why it reported it as 127M. :-P The point is that it works and easily!
Contacts and SMS
Next, I had to test access to my Contancts and SMS'. So I had to explore the phone software that comes with Linux. I hit upon one that autodetects the phone and it found my Nokia 6300 properly! Voila! There it was, connected. The program was Wammu.
Photos and Text
I transfered photos I had taken around the world onto my phone, set one as the wallpaper and set the folder as a Screensaver in Slideset mode. WOW! The photos look as amazing as they do on the computer! This is working better than I expected. So I tried an OpenOffice .odt file, since the OS is Linux. To be fair I also copied a .doc file to the phone. Neither of them would open on the Nokia though. So I tried a plain text file and it worked fine. Now my recipe for my mom's pancakes is on my phone. ;-) Love them with maple syrup and a little butter!

AUDIO

Ok, those aspects were solved. A major one was left to be tackled: audio. I moved a ringtone to my Media card and accessed it on my computer USB connection to the phone. I tried converting it to .ogg, which really compresses the file, but the phone couldn't recognize the format. So this required some research. I found that .aac (the Nokia favored audio format) is a version of MP4, which itself is a version of MPEG. Be careful! Even now I accidentally type .acc rather than .aac .
Codecs
The open source codecs that allow decoding/encoding of .aac are FAAC and FAAD2. So here are the programs for Linux I found easily by a search within the YAST Software Installation interface that provide access to them. Floola (iPod interface, which allows converting for iPod formats, including .aac), jRipper, ogmrip, audiokonverter, encode2mpeg, MoreAmp, pacpl and shrip. I will try these in a moment. I just installed them. :-)
Audio Conversion Programs
Ok, so I learned from the settings in a program that FAAC is the encoder and FAAD2 is the decoder. MoreAmp was screwed up in the font size, so words were overlapping and impossible to read. I haven't seen this problem in a Linux program in many years! How shocking to see it now! Also, there is no clear way to transcode a file. So I moved on to jRipper. It was more hopeful. It appears to have the capability to convert mp3, aac and others. You can work on files on your drive, not just from removeable media (DVD and CD). However, when I selected the directory from the Nokia's media card, which has the .aac ringtone, the jRipper only showed me the two mp3's I placed in the folder. It couldn't find the .aac file. Szkoda!

Next program...ogmrip seems to only handle video files. I tried and tried to no avail. :-P Next! ... Floola requires an actual iPod. HA!!! If I owned Linux, do you think I'd also own an iPod!!!??? Next! ... audiokonverter should do the job. This might require the command line, but I'll search for an entry in the SuSE menu first. Well, I couldn't find it and it doesn't run from the commandline. So either I am misspelling it by capitalization or it didn't get installed. I am firing up YAST to see. Meanwhile, from the terminal window I tried the final three programs (encode2mpeg, pacpl and shrip) and discovered they are all commandline programs. Hmm...well, I could write a quick script to do what I need and then just run that script in the directory that I temporarily store the .aac/.mp3 files in to convert without having to worry about attributes to the commands. If you're lost just treat me as if I have lapsed into a brief mood of schizophrenia. Now I'll continue with normal talk again. ;-)
Audiokonverter
Well, I tried audionkonverter. It actually installed itself so that you can right-click on your file and choose the action menu and convert to, then the new file type you want (i.e. mp3, ogg, etc...). That was cool! It isn't just a commandline program after all. However, it did not convert my .aac file to .mp3 successfully. None of the other file format succeeded either. So I give up on that program. NEXT!!! Pacpl looks interesting. There is also another package that integrates it into Konqueror, but I'm not yet sure how. We'll soon see!
Pacpl
This is a perl program that accesses the necessary libraries to convert audio formats. Perl is rather fast, so I'm not afraid of lag. I'm more afraid of dependency hell, since any perl program may require other perl packages, yet not let YAST know at the time YAST is installing the perl program. Then you have to try the Perl repository and a special interface for it. YUCK!!!

VIDEO
3gp Converter looks the most promising. It is a Komander script, so that must first be installed. Then download the appropriate RPM of 3gp Converter. Under SuSE it is safest to right-click and install an RPM with KPackage. Believe me! When you first install an RPM you should mark the Replace Files and Test boxes. Once you have a Result=0 then it means nothing went wrong. Then unmark Test and clock Install again. :-) I have Komander, but this 3gp does not know it. So I gave up on it.

I found the perfect program for video transcoding for PC<->Nokia on Linux. It's called Mobile Media Converter. This makes the transcoding a piece of cake with drag and drop list building, preset conversions by button (for novices) and tweaking of parameters for the slightly more advanced user. In short, IT JUST WORKS! :-)

PDF, WORD, EXCEL, OPEN OFFICE, etc...So now I want to read pdf's, doc's, xls', odt's, etc... What do I do? I found some programs made by Zesium Mobile. There is Mobile PDF, DocViewer, and MobiWord. Ok, these little programs do not substitute for OpenOffice nor for MS Word/Excel, but they will get you by in a pinch!

Mobile PDF shows PDF's, but without graphics. DocViewer shows excel spreadsheets, but the lines wrap a lot and the original may be difficult to dicipher. You'll just have to try it yourself. MobiWord allows you to create .rtf files in a knockoff of a very old Word '95 interface. At least they work, though they do not accomplish everything I want with my phone yet.

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