Does anyone hare have an Android based phone and use it with Linux on their desktop?
Does anyone hare have an Android based phone and use it with Linux on their desktop?
Chris,
Depends on what you mean by use it with Linux. I got the second-ish Android phone that came out from HTC - the Magic. It's running Android 1.6 and I've been using it for 18 months+. It syncs directly to Google for mail/calendar/contacts. I've installed apps, media and other stuff directly on to the card using a suitable card reader on my laptop and desktop linux PCs.
Other than that, I haven't had much need to connect the phone directly to the PC. What use cases are you interested in?
Peter.
On Mon, Oct 11, 2010 at 07:41:15PM +0100, samwise wrote:
Does anyone hare have an Android based phone and use it with Linux on their desktop?
Chris,
Depends on what you mean by use it with Linux. I got the second-ish Android phone that came out from HTC - the Magic. It's running Android 1.6 and I've been using it for 18 months+. It syncs directly to Google for mail/calendar/contacts. I've installed apps, media and other stuff directly on to the card using a suitable card reader on my laptop and desktop linux PCs.
Other than that, I haven't had much need to connect the phone directly to the PC. What use cases are you interested in?
Well we'd *really* like to synchronize a phone with the desktop but, as that seems to be totally impossible with *any* phone nowadays, maybe simply being able to copy contacts and calendar from phone to desktop would be useful.
It's all very well being able to synchronise via the cloud but it does need an internet connection to be useful and that isn't always sensibly possible for us while on the move. Synchronising direct from phone to laptop would be *much* more useful.
Then I suspect you'll struggle - you'll probably have to roll your own, or make do with what you can find on the app store. Not sure I've heard of anything like that (though I haven't been looking!).
There is this:
http://www.markspace.com/products/android/missing-sync-android.html
But it's for Windows/Mac, I'm afraid.
Peter.
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Chris G wrote:
Does anyone hare have an Android based phone and use it with Linux on their desktop?
I have an HTC Desire, and use it with Linux (and Mac) in an occasional development capacity (installing test apps and debugging javascript, etc, over adb). Mandriva and Mac OS X both trivially mount the entire filesystem as a USB disk drive, however although stuff like music and photos are directly browseable and copy-able, all the other data appears to be in some binary format (and the filenames all look vaguely MD5-with-an-a-to-Z-radix-ish). I store my contacts (for there are not that many) directly on the SIM for portability - I did try saving a test contact to the phone itself and seeing if I could grep for it, to no avail.
The phone does, however, offer the opportunity to export contacts info to the SD card, and presumably from there it should be trivial to copy that off, either whilst mounted (there's a "backup" folder that I guess it might use for this purpose) or using a card reader. As far as the calendar goes, it syncs directly with Google calendar which of course has an API to download iCal-format data from as often as you want.
Hth, Simon
- -- - --------------------------------------------------------------------- Simon Ransome http://nosher.net
Photography RSS feed - http://nosher.net/images/images.rss
I have an Android phone and I let calendar and contacts sync to the cloud. Then by using proxoid - http://code.google.com/p/proxoid/ to connect my laptop to the internet via the phone, I can then sync my laptop. I can do a little web browsing this way but can't get access to my email via Thunderbird for some reason.
However, using proxoid to connect my laptop to the cloud is completely against the T&C's of my carrier (T-Mobile), so although I do it, I keep it to a bare minimum so as not to arouse suspicion!
Good luck.
Martin
On 11 October 2010 21:10, simon ransome simon@nosher.net wrote:
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Chris G wrote:
Does anyone hare have an Android based phone and use it with Linux on their desktop?
I have an HTC Desire, and use it with Linux (and Mac) in an occasional development capacity (installing test apps and debugging javascript, etc, over adb). Mandriva and Mac OS X both trivially mount the entire filesystem as a USB disk drive, however although stuff like music and photos are directly browseable and copy-able, all the other data appears to be in some binary format (and the filenames all look vaguely MD5-with-an-a-to-Z-radix-ish). I store my contacts (for there are not that many) directly on the SIM for portability - I did try saving a test contact to the phone itself and seeing if I could grep for it, to no avail.
The phone does, however, offer the opportunity to export contacts info to the SD card, and presumably from there it should be trivial to copy that off, either whilst mounted (there's a "backup" folder that I guess it might use for this purpose) or using a card reader. As far as the calendar goes, it syncs directly with Google calendar which of course has an API to download iCal-format data from as often as you want.
Hth, Simon
Simon Ransome http://nosher.net
Photography RSS feed - http://nosher.net/images/images.rss
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On Mon, Oct 11, 2010 at 09:10:57PM +0100, simon ransome wrote:
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Chris G wrote:
Does anyone hare have an Android based phone and use it with Linux on their desktop?
I have an HTC Desire, and use it with Linux (and Mac) in an occasional development capacity (installing test apps and debugging javascript, etc, over adb). Mandriva and Mac OS X both trivially mount the entire filesystem as a USB disk drive, however although stuff like music and photos are directly browseable and copy-able, all the other data appears to be in some binary format (and the filenames all look vaguely MD5-with-an-a-to-Z-radix-ish). I store my contacts (for there are not that many) directly on the SIM for portability - I did try saving a test contact to the phone itself and seeing if I could grep for it, to no avail.
The phone does, however, offer the opportunity to export contacts info to the SD card, and presumably from there it should be trivial to copy that off, either whilst mounted (there's a "backup" folder that I guess it might use for this purpose) or using a card reader. As far as the calendar goes, it syncs directly with Google calendar which of course has an API to download iCal-format data from as often as you want.
OK, thanks, that's all useful information in deciding which way to jump.
On Mon, Oct 11, 2010 at 09:10:57PM +0100, simon ransome wrote:
Chris G wrote:
Does anyone hare have an Android based phone and use it with Linux on their desktop?
I have an HTC Desire, and use it with Linux (and Mac) in an occasional development capacity (installing test apps and debugging javascript, etc, over adb). Mandriva and Mac OS X both trivially mount the entire filesystem as a USB disk drive, however although stuff like music and photos are directly browseable and copy-able, all the other data appears to be in some binary format (and the filenames all look vaguely MD5-with-an-a-to-Z-radix-ish).
My experience is that local data is mostly stored in sqlite; certainly SMS/MMS are (and the database can be read just fine on an x86 desktop box with sqlite). I haven't felt the need to poke at the contact stuff but I'd be surprised if it was different.
J.
On Mon, 11 Oct 2010, simon ransome wrote:
I did try saving a test contact to the phone itself and seeing if I could grep for it, to no avail.
A quick google around suggests that the contacts are in a file
/data/data/com.android.providers.contacts/databases/contacts2.db
No idea about the format, though.
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On 12/10/2010 11:03, Dan wrote:
On Mon, 11 Oct 2010, simon ransome wrote:
I did try saving a test contact to the phone itself and seeing if I could grep for it, to no avail.
A quick google around suggests that the contacts are in a file
/data/data/com.android.providers.contacts/databases/contacts2.db
No idea about the format, though.
Interestingly, that folder does not seem to exist on my Desire - at least it's not visible via the mounted file system, and when doing an "adb shell" I don't seem to have permissions to traverse anything other than the root directory (the device isn't rooted - it's running O2's Froyo/2.2[1]).
There is a commercial Android sshd server [which gives an optional root user] available via the marketplace, but it's $1.50 and they only take credit cards, so I can't be arsed to download it to try to see if I can escalate privileges to better explore the file system.
However, your post did get me poking around adb[2] a bit - it turns out that, for instance, I can't get root permission on any production-build device (see above about not being rooted), and although I appear to be able to cd into the directory you posted above, I still can't see any of the contents in it, so it's kinda moot really:
MacOSX: adb shell shell$ cd /data/data/com.android.providers.contacts/databases shell$ ls opendir failed, Permission denied
The format though - as was suggested elsewhere in this thread yesterday, and despite my not being able to open it to know for certain - does seem to be SqLite, at least as corroborated by several references I've come across.
Meanwhile, I did forget to mention in my original reply that the Android contacts manager can both export and import contacts to/from the SD card, so that seems to offer some scope for some rudimentary roll-your-own syncing (however, doing syncing well is a lot harder than it sounds!).
Simon
[1] thankfully, O2 do little more than skin the phone's start-up splash, unlike the crapware that Orange and Voda have insisting on stuffing on their Android phones in the past
[2] adb - Android Debug Bridge - is a really useful command-line utility that comes with the Android SDK - it allows direct installation of .apk apps to the device, detail logging of phone events and JS and an interactive shell, amongst loads of other stuff
- -- ====================================================================== Simon Ransome http://nosher.net Photo RSS Feed: http://nosher.net/images/images.rss
On Tue, Oct 12, 2010 at 11:03:49AM +0100, Dan wrote:
On Mon, 11 Oct 2010, simon ransome wrote:
I did try saving a test contact to the phone itself and seeing if I could grep for it, to no avail.
A quick google around suggests that the contacts are in a file
/data/data/com.android.providers.contacts/databases/contacts2.db
No idea about the format, though.
Berkeley DB possibly?
On 12 Oct 16:35, Chris G wrote:
On Tue, Oct 12, 2010 at 11:03:49AM +0100, Dan wrote:
On Mon, 11 Oct 2010, simon ransome wrote:
I did try saving a test contact to the phone itself and seeing if I could grep for it, to no avail.
A quick google around suggests that the contacts are in a file
/data/data/com.android.providers.contacts/databases/contacts2.db
No idea about the format, though.
Berkeley DB possibly?
As others have stated, sqlite.
Berkeley DB is only ever any use if you want straight key->value pairs.
Cheers,
On Tue, Oct 12, 2010 at 05:27:08PM +0100, Brett Parker wrote:
On 12 Oct 16:35, Chris G wrote:
On Tue, Oct 12, 2010 at 11:03:49AM +0100, Dan wrote:
On Mon, 11 Oct 2010, simon ransome wrote:
I did try saving a test contact to the phone itself and seeing if I could grep for it, to no avail.
A quick google around suggests that the contacts are in a file
/data/data/com.android.providers.contacts/databases/contacts2.db
No idea about the format, though.
Berkeley DB possibly?
As others have stated, sqlite.
Berkeley DB is only ever any use if you want straight key->value pairs.
It's what Evolution uses for its addresses database, that's why I suggested it - the above file *is* an addresses database so it was a not unreasonable idea.
My wife's evolution addresses are at:-
~/.evolution/addressbook/local/system/addressbook.db
... and that most definitely is a Berkeley DB.
On Mon, 11 Oct 2010, Chris G wrote:
Does anyone hare have an Android based phone and use it with Linux on their desktop?
Since we're on the subject, I've been thinking of getting a smartphone, and am confused in a number of ways...
- The "license model" entries on Wikipedia suggest that Android is closer to being a pure open-source operating system than Maemo; mailing list chatter, on the other hand, suggests it's the other way round. Anyone know which it is, please?
- If one buys an Android handset outright, rather than getting it with a 'phone service contract, would one normally get root privileges as standard, or does the handset still need "rooting"?
- The rooting process seems to consist basically of inserting a third-party "ROM" into the handset's bootloader. The usual case appears to be that the ROM takes the form of a pre-compiled binary. The idea of getting more complete control over my hardware by putting a precompiled third-party binary in the bootloader seems counter-intuitive. Do third-party ROM producers disclose their source code?
On 13 Oct 01:36, Dan wrote:
On Mon, 11 Oct 2010, Chris G wrote:
Does anyone hare have an Android based phone and use it with Linux on their desktop?
Since we're on the subject, I've been thinking of getting a smartphone, and am confused in a number of ways...
- The "license model" entries on Wikipedia suggest that Android is closer to being a pure open-source operating system than Maemo; mailing list chatter, on the other hand, suggests it's the other way round. Anyone know which it is, please?
The Maemo system is just a linux system, "rooting" it involves installing one package that is in the official repositories. The system itself uses X11 and a window manager. And the kernel is closer to a mainline kernel than the Android kernel.
On Wed, 13 Oct 2010, Brett Parker wrote:
The Maemo system is just a linux system, "rooting" it involves installing one package that is in the official repositories. The system itself uses X11 and a window manager. And the kernel is closer to a mainline kernel than the Android kernel.
But both the Android kernel patches and the Android GUI are released under a DFSG-compatible licence, right?
Dan wrote:
On Mon, 11 Oct 2010, Chris G wrote:
Does anyone hare have an Android based phone and use it with Linux on their desktop?
Since we're on the subject, I've been thinking of getting a smartphone, and am confused in a number of ways...
- The "license model" entries on Wikipedia suggest that Android is closer to being a pure open-source operating system than Maemo; mailing list chatter, on the other hand, suggests it's the other way round. Anyone know which it is, please?
Here is my take on it: http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/fsuk-manchester/2009-11/msg00042.html
I think part of the confusion comes from the implications of permissive free software licensing. And this shows why copyleft licensing is preferable so that every user has the freedom: http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/
If one buys an Android handset outright, rather than getting it with a 'phone service contract, would one normally get root privileges as standard, or does the handset still need "rooting"?
The rooting process seems to consist basically of inserting a third-party "ROM" into the handset's bootloader. The usual case appears to be that the ROM takes the form of a pre-compiled binary. The idea of getting more complete control over my hardware by putting a precompiled third-party binary in the bootloader seems counter-intuitive. Do third-party ROM producers disclose their source code?
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Brett Parker -
Chris G -
Dan -
Jonathan McDowell -
Martin Collins -
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samwise -
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simon ransome