General Gammu FAQ¶
Will Gammu work on my system?¶
Gammu is known to run on wide range of systems. It can be compiled natively on Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, OpenBSD and Microsoft Windows. It can be probably compiled also elsewhere, but nobody has yet tried. On some platforms however you might lack support for some specific kind of devices (eg. Bluetooth or USB).
See also
How to set sender number in message?¶
You can quite often see messages sent from textual address or with some other nice looking sender number. However this needs to be done in the GSM network and it is not possible to influence this from the terminal device (phone). Usually it is set by SMSC and some network providers allow you to set this based on some contract. Alternatively you can use their SMS gateways, which also allow this functionality.
See also
Can I use Gammu to send MMS?¶
MMS contains of two parts - the actual MMS data in SMIL format and the SMS
containing notification about the data. Gammu can create the notification SMS,
where you just need to put URL of the data (use gammu sendsms
MMSINDICATOR for that). However you need to encode MMS data yourself or use
other program to do that.
Can I use Gammu to receive MMS?¶
MMS contains of two parts - the actual MMS data in SMIL format and the SMS containing notification about the data. Gammu (or SMSD) will receive the notification SMS, where URL to download the MMS content is included.
However in most situations the URL is accessible only from the network and APN specific for the MMS messages, so downloading it is a bit tricky and needs to connect using GSM modem to the network using this APN.
Device name always changes on Linux, how to solve that?¶
You can use udev to assign persistent device name (used as
Device). You can either use standard persistent names based on
serial number (located in /dev/serial/by-id/) or define own rules:
ACTION=="add", SUBSYSTEMS=="usb", ATTRS{manufacturer}=="Nokia", KERNEL=="ttyUSB*", SYMLINK+="phone"
Better is to use vendor and product IDs (you can get them for example using lsusb):
ACTION=="add", SUBSYSTEMS=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="xxxx", ATTRS{idProduct}=="yyyy", SYMLINK+="phone"
If you’re using 3G modem, it’s quite likely that it exposes multiple interfaces and only one of them is good for Gammu usage. In this case you should match against interface number as well:
ACTION=="add", SUBSYSTEMS=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="xxxx", ATTRS{idProduct}=="yyyy", ATTRS{bInterfaceNumber}=="00", SYMLINK+="phone"
You can match by various attributes, you can figure them using udevadm command:
udevadm info --name=/dev/ttyUSB1 --attribute-walk
See also
Various documentation on creating persistent device names using udev is available online, for example on the Debian wiki or in Writing udev rules document.
Mutliple programs using same device cause various errors, how to fix that?¶
Gammu needs to be the only program using the device, otherwise you will get strange errors from both programs as they will read answer to command sent by something else.
In gammu, it can happen quite early with error message “Phone does not support enabled echo, it can not work with Gammu!”, but it can be spotted later as well, depending on various conditions.
In case you see such behavior, check what other programs are using given device. This can be done using fuser tool:
fuser -va /dev/ttyACM0
The usual programs involve:
NetworkManager with ModemManager, you need to disable mobile networking to stop it using the device, disabling the modem connection does not seem to be enough.
Other Gammu instance, in case you want to interact with modem while SMSD is running see Invoking Gammu and suspending SMSD.
What are free alternatives to Gammu?¶
It depends on your phone. For Nokia or AT based phones, you can try Gnokii, but Gammu should be superior in most cases. For Symbian phone you can try using Series60-Remote, which works pretty well with S60 phones, though Gammu brings various fixes to their applet.
If you are looking for synchronisation, try using something what supports SyncML to retrieve contacts or calendar from your phone, for example OpenSync or syncEvolution.