Using gnokii to manage a Nokia 6300 mobile phone

Tags: howtos

Published on
« Previous post: Using Adobe Minion Pro with LaTeX — Next post: New HOWTO and some resolutions »

I recently wanted to download some contact data from the address book of my Nokia 6300 mobile. It turned out that this is less painful than it sounds: By using the gnokii package, I was able to get a dump of my address book in VCARD format.

Installation and configuration

  • gnokii is available in the ports collection. Great.
  • Copy /usr/local/etc/gnokiirc.sample to .gnokiirc
  • Modify .gnokiirc

Since the defaults of this file are good, I only had to change the following lines:

# Since I want a USB connection
port = 1
connection = dku2libusb

# Other phones may require other settings, of course
model = series40

Connecting the phone

  • Using a USB-to-mini-USB cable, connect the phone
  • When the phone asks about the connection mode, select Ǹokia mode (or something similar)
  • Issue a gnokii --identify command to check whether the phone is reachable

Dumping the address book

This required some reading. The manpage of gnokii is written rather well, fortunately. In the end I resorted to:

gnokii --getphonebook ME 1 end -v > contacts.vcf

This takes all contacts (hence the 1 end) from the internal memory of the phone, converts them to the VCARD format, and stores them in contacts.vcf, where they may be updated and processed.