SMS with gnokii and nokia 6230i

Sending sms via bluetooth with gentoo is “fairly” simple:

# emerge -pv gnokii
[ebuild   R   ] app-mobilephone/gnokii-0.6.10  +X +bluetooth -irda +mysql -nls -postgres +sms 0 kB
# emerge gnokii
(...)

Now tune your /etc/gnokiirc like this:

[global]
port = <your bluetooth MAC here>
model = 6510
initlength = default
connection = bluetooth
use_locking = yes
serial_baudrate = 19200
smsc_timeout = 10

[gnokiid]
bindir = /usr/sbin/
</your>

Then launch xgnokii, the gui is intuïtive enough. If you want to send the messages via cmdline, just use the example from gnokii’s manpage:

echo "This is a test message" | gnokii --sendsms +48501123456 -r

Troubleshooting:

  • Q: When I try to run xgnokki or gnokki, it prints “Couldn’t open PHONET device: Connection refused”
  • A: Try again, it seems that there’s a bug related with first-time bluetooth connect attempts
  • Q: I set my cellphone bluetooth settings to autoconnect, but it keeps asking for my PIN on every SMS I send, why ?
  • A: Yep, perhaps a bluetooth security measure ? Bug or feature ?