Michal Čihař - Blog Archives for python-gammu

Happy new year!

Maybe I'm a bit late, but happy new year! I was quite silent in last days as I was having rest from computer and enjoyed real life.

What will this year bring? I will hopefully become Debian Developer, as only required step right now is account creation. This is good news for Gammu users who run Debian, as I would like to upload testing versions to experimental (as well as appropriate python-gammu builds).

What else? Some new releases of my projects :-). I'm still working on Wammu and configuration wizard. There is a bit more work than I expected, but it should be ready during January. I don't expect much new features in python-gammu, it will be just kept in sync with gammu.

The only remaining project is Ukolovnik, which is in perfect state for me, however other users request more features and I should sometimes get at least to patch merging :-).

Windows developer wanted

It looks like problems of Wammu on Windows are over my possibilities. I don't use this system at all and I'm unable to help with fixing found problems. The current biggest problem is outdated python-gammu library which contains few bugs and too old Gammu library.

Compiling new version for somebody with experiences on compiling Python modules on Windows should be easy task. But nobody volunteered to do this so far and one build I got from BitPim developers is not a long term solution.

Upcoming Wammu version might be incompatible with that old python-gammu, so future of Wammu for Windows doesn't look good right now. It's up to you, who use Windows, if you want this port to be alive.

Gammu talk on LinuxAlt

If you will be first weekend in November near Brno, you might be interested in LinuxAlt, where I will have a talk about Gammu and generally mobile phones under Linux.

The talk will be in Czech language as most of audience is expected to be Czech speaking.

New python-gammu user

As it already appeared on Gammu wiki, I consider it official. I'm happy to announce that there is another python-gammu based open source application to manipulate your phone. It is called gMobileMedia and it is focused on multimedia data stored in phones.

It's nice to see that somebody else is actually using my Python bindings :-).

How to support more phones?

Users always request support for their latest shiny new phone. But how to manage such support in environment where you can not buy each new phone to implement support for it?

You can try write driver only by using documentation for manufacturers who provide it (like Sony-Ericsson), but there will most likely be bugs which need hardware to be debugged.

For phones where is no documentation available (eg. Nokia), it is almost impossible to support them without having access to actual device (at least through user who has enough interest in improving support).

I'd like to implement full support for Sony-Ericsson to achieve comparable feature set to FMA. However I still have more important expenses than buying phone from them, so this task stuck for long time in my queue. In fact it also holds Wammu development as I'd like to start with more complex feature set than my current phone supports and it's impossible to implement it without phone.

So what now? Maybe is here somebody who would be interested enough in improved tools and will help me buying such phone. But I don't believe this will happen, at least my current experiences tell so…