Michal Čihař - Blog Archives for Gammu

I decided to change a bit short term plans for Gammu releases and I'm now approaching to 1.24.0 which will be mostly bug fixing and documentation release without any major changes, because it turned out that there is lot of things to fix ;-).

This time there are no really major changes since 1.23.91, only some small fixes in AT code, messages and translation cleanup and better logging from SMSD in some cases.

Full list of changes follows:

• LUID reading requires IrMC profile.
• Locations for GlobeTrotter 3G+ start at 0 (bug #847).
• More verbose logging of delivery reports (bug #824).
• Increase default DeliveryReportDelay (bug #824).
• Fixed handling of SMS locations (bug #853).

You can download from usual place: http://cihar.com/gammu/,

Debian users will find packages in experimental soon, SUSE, Fedora and Mandriva users can check experimental repository in OpenSuse Build Service.

Welcome back on weekly schedule of Gammu releases. The biggest change in this release is in SMSD and RunOnReceive scripting support, which has been improved and now can contain any arbitrary command. Besides that support for vNote format has been added for backups/restores and some minor bugs were fixed.

Full list of changes follows:

• PostgreSQL backend now supports IDs for RunOnReceive.
• RunOnReceive is started through shell not directly.
• Fixed reading of empty phonebook entries from Samsung (bug #809).
• Reread messages if CMGL shows them corrupted (bug #691).
• Added support for vNote files.
• Properly detect Nokia 6220 Classic (bug #840).
• Fix writing of phonebook on Motorola V8 (bug #827).
• Detect daemon on FreeBSD.
• Ignore charset errors on AT init as some phones might need PIN.
• Optionally use MT for phone phonebook for AT phones.
• Added support for quick dial numbers on AT phones.

You can download from usual place: http://cihar.com/gammu/,

Debian users will find packages in experimental soon, SUSE, Fedora and Mandriva users can check experimental repository in OpenSuse Build Service.

While debugging some problems one user reported with Nokia 6220 Classic, I noticed that recently introduced fbususb connection type somehow works with recent Symbian Nokia phones. This might be interesting way to go (instead of porting gnapplet), I never thought of possibility that Nokia has implemented something really backward compatible in their Symbian phones, let's see whether it can actually be used for something useful.

It looks like I'm definitely losing Monday release schedule, but it does not matter that much, new release is here anyway. I wanted to push some bigger changes into first testing release after 1.23, but instead of that I did bunch of bug fixes, documentation and test improvements.

Full list of changes follows:

• Fixed decoding of Samsung memory entries.
• Properly handle corrupted messages from Nokia phones (bug #811).
• Fix parsing of calls from Alcatel C701 (bug #831).
• Fixed handling of error states with -len and -autolen parameters.
• Fixed possible crash in DBI engine.
• PostgreSQL engine properly uses sequences instead of reinventing.
• MySQL engine properly uses auto increments instead of reinventing.
• Fix escaping of field name in PostgreSQL engine.
• Better SMSD files logging.
• Added testing of SMSD files engine.
• Increase timeout for AT settings SIM card SMS storage.
• Fixed date formatting in PostgreSQL SMSD service.
• Add option to install without documentation.
• Add -textutf8 option for TEXT sms.
• Fix crash when some lines in config are too long.
• Make smsdrc example better looking by removing obsolete docs.
• Make dku2 connection types work on Linux (alias to fbususb).
• Better calculation of signal percent.
• Fixed getting of memory status for some Nokias (bug #836).

You can download from usual place: http://cihar.com/gammu/,

Debian users will find packages in experimental soon, SUSE, Fedora and Mandriva users can check experimental repository in OpenSuse Build Service.

After some thinking I've just filled in application for Gammu in Google Summer of Code 2009. I feel the project is recently getting some boost and it would be great if some students would help us with new ideas.

On the other side I'm afraid that chances to get accepted for such a small project is quite limited, but if you have some great ideas which could be implemented as a summer project, feel free to add them to our wiki, maybe they will attract somebody :-).

Ideas page: http://www.gammu.org/wiki/index.php?title=Gammu:GSoC2009

After recently introduced tradition, I again come with bugfix update for 1.23.0 called 1.23.1. This time there is no critical fix as in 1.22.1, but few fixes, which might annoy users, for example forgotten installation of gammu-smsd-monitor tool.

Full list of changes:

• Documentation clarification.
• Translations update.
• Actually install gammu-smsd-monitor.
• Fix recording received messages count for MySQL.
• Fix SMS location handling for Huawei E160 (bug #825).
• Do not probe for MPBR support all the time.

You can download from usual place: http://cihar.com/gammu/,

Debian users will find packages in unstable soon, SUSE, Fedora and Mandriva users can check repository in OpenSuse Build Service and Ubuntu in my PPA.

Recently, I made available information about Gammu and Wammu in machine readable formats (currently DOAP and PAD). In order to fully use advantage of PAD, I decided to push both Gammu and Wammu to some PAD enabled sites I found. At least it should give it a bit more visibility in Windows world.

When I started looking for these sites, I was surprised that there is so much of them. Yes it is quite easy to setup such site as ASP provides PHP scripts to make such site, but I expected that people would be a bit sane and would not start 1001th software catalogue. But anyway, let's submit my software there to spread the world a bit ;-).

The important site (at least as far as I remember them from times when I was using Windows) like Tucows or cnet downloads, have some lengthy review process, what is okay for me. But more funny are random small sites, where you immediately get 5/5 stars or sticker 100% Vista Compatible. Who cares, let's see if it will really attract some users.

After two months of heavy development, new Gammu stable release is out. There are quite a lot of changes and I'm not really convinced it makes sense to include full list of almost 150 lines from ChangeLog, so here are the most important changes (I'm sure I missed something, but I think the list is already too big):

• Lot of SMSD related changes.
  • New DBI backend which handles nicely many databases.
  • SMSD and inject tool are now separate binaries.
  • New monitoring tool for SMSD.
  • SMSD can now run as a Windows service.
  • SMSD behaves nicely as a daemon on Linux (syslog support, SIGHUP handling, proper daemonizing, etc.).
• Merger of python-gammu.
  • Python bindings are no longer separate projects, they are now part of Gammu release.
• Better support for Nokia USB cables on Linux.
  • Gammu now has libusb-1.0 based support for Nokia USB cables.
  • This gives us performance boost and support for DKU-2 cables.
• Much more tests.
  • About 1/3 of code is now covered by test cases.
  • Dummy phone backend to allow testing without connected phone.
• General code cleanup.
  • Fixed tons of problems found by test cases, valgrind and cppcheck.
  • Reorganised code structure a bit to make clear what parts are supported.
• Documentation.
  • Several new man pages have been added, most important is documentation for SMSD and all it's features.

You can download from usual place: http://cihar.com/gammu/,

Debian users will find packages in unstable soon, SUSE, Fedora and Mandriva users can check repository in OpenSuse Build Service and Ubuntu in my PPA.

Okay, again delay :-). I wanted to push this version out yesterday, but real life has caught me and I did not manage to do it. So this time Gammu is released on Tuesday, but I want to get back to Monday releases next week.

If all things go without problems, this is last testing release before 1.23.0. Besides changing files structure a lot (I hope current one better matches current state of code), there are only some minor fixes and cleanups.

Full list of changes follows:

• Reorganize directory structure to match current state of things.
• Completely switch DBI driver to utf-8.
• Fixed date off by 1900 error in some cases.
• Cleanup a bit phonet driver.
• Handle properly requests for network code (bug #819).
• Allow to enter more security codes through SMSD (bug #819).
• Fixed restoring to specific folder on AT (bug #815).

You can download from usual place: http://cihar.com/gammu/,

Debian users will find packages in experimental soon, SUSE, Fedora and Mandriva users can check experimental repository in OpenSuse Build Service.

Today is Monday, what means it is time for Gammu release. Main improvements are this time in DBI driver and dummy phone driver. This allowed increasing number of test cases and they revealed number of bugs in code, which were fixed. The good thing is that we now have covered 30% of code by testcases. There is still place to improve, but I think this is good milestone, because most of untested code lies in drivers for different phones, which are hard to test automatically without having real phone connected to test server.

Other thing I would like to highlight is DBI backend in SMSD. It is still new, but you should consider using it instead of old MYSQL or PGSQL backends, because it behaves much more nicely to your database and won't ruin system performance that easily (though there are still things to improve). Unfortunately it is not available on Windows right now, but I hope this will change in future.

Full list of changes follows:

• Fix some memory leaks found by cppcheck.
• Implemented reconnecting/retrying in DBI driver.
• Fix memory leaks in SMSD found by valgrind.
• Fix decoding of another Nokia message type.
• Support for passing received message ID in DBI.
• Dummy phone now supports phonebook, calendar, todo, filesystem.
• Experimental SMSD monitor support on Windows.
• Added ID for Nokia 2680 (bug #813).
• Number of retries of message send in SMSD can be configured.
• Updated SQL files to new version (mostly added useful indexes).
• Dropped own logic for generating IDs for SMS and rely on SQL server (only in DBI driver for now).

You can download from usual place: http://cihar.com/gammu/,

Debian users will find packages in experimental soon, SUSE, Fedora and Mandriva users can check experimental repository in OpenSuse Build Service.