About Nokia N900: Contacts, rsync and flashlight

I wanted this phone as soon as I found out about its release. Still, a full-fledged mobile computer-phone with native debian-based Linux and X. 4 months of waiting and now I have it. In this article I want to talk about the three functions of the phone, contacts, rsync via ssh, as well as a flashlight ;-)


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Contacts

It would seem that the phone was fastened here as a last resort, and something simple should have come out. But in the end it turned out that everything should be equal. Inside the contact are all possible types of communication, jaber, ICQ, sms, phone, skype and even twitter. All text protocols with a single chat interface (Twitter and SMS, too, yes). When choosing a call to a regular number, you can choose to call via GSM, via Skype or SIP. The status of the contact is visible. Naturally, all contacts are downloaded from servers, you only need to combine them. I don’t see the point of using any other messengers on this phone, besides, any protocol can be implemented with plugins.



But there are drawbacks that I hope will fix. First, there is a lack of one hardware button - “start a call”. There are some simple ways to go to the phone, but they are not as good as the hardware button. Secondly, the “phone” application is separated from contacts, which is, on the one hand, good, but on the other hand, integration is not yet sufficient. For example, I did not find a way to go to editing a contact from a phone. And if we talk about chats, then you can not set different statuses for different services. If I want to call via
Skype, you have to be included online and in jabber. Immediately sypyatsya messages that I would better read on my computer.

By the way, to connect to ICQ and Twitter you need to install plugins, they are in testing and developer repositories.

SSH and rsync sync

The first packages I installed were the ssh client and ssh server. Everything is clear with the client, now you can adminit servers, easily and from anywhere. This is much better than putty for Symbian. There is also an idea to make managing the home computer via ssh (add-sub sound, send to sleep mode).

The server also allows you to poke around in the phone, right from the computer, on a normal keyboard. Copy files by scp. And, of course, to do rsync, both in that, and in other party. The first problem was that the user cannot change the password, at least because of this, the application manager stops working, and maybe something else. By default, the password is empty, so ssh does not allow it. The solution is not quite simple, but whoever has been using ssh has long since set it up - you need to add your public one
the key (how to create and configure it, you can read it here ) and go to the phone without a password (at the same time, you can set up synchronization by krone).

To begin, create a directory with which to synchronize files from the phone.

  mkdir ~ / arc / n900 

I decided not to synchronize everything yet, but only the directory / home / user / MyDocs. I think someone will want to completely / home / user or even / (here the truth will have to do everything from under the root). Note that there is no slash at the end of MyDocs, which means that the directory MyDocs will be created in ~ / arc / n900. Now it remains to make a couple of scripts.

 sync-from-phone.sh 

 #! / bin / sh
 rsync -e ssh --progress -lzuogthvr --delete-after user@192.168.1.16: / home / user / MyDocs ~ / arc / n900

 sync-to-phone.sh 
 rsync -e ssh --progress -lzuthvr ~ / arc / n900 / MyDocs / user@192.168.1.16: / home / user / MyDocs /

The router always gives the same IP address to the phone. I hope you will also. Here it should be noted that the --delete-after parameter is missing in the synchronization to the phone. So, if I added the file to the phone, but did not synchronize it on the computer, then when synchronizing from the computer to the phone, the file will not be deleted. And vice versa, if I delete something from the phone, then it is deleted from the computer. So, if you added something on your computer to the sync directory, first synchronize to the phone and then from there.

Torch

I think that the phone just has to be a flashlight, this is a very useful thing, and it’s not convenient to carry a regular flashlight with you. It's good that it is in the N900, you just need to install the flashlight package. It was pleasantly surprised that this is not a separate prog, but a switch in the quick settings of the phone. Just do not forget to move the camera shutter, or the flashlight icon will not appear.

That's all for today. In general, the phone is very pleased, of course, there are still some shortcomings and glitches, but they are much smaller than the ones at the beginning of the 5800.