Syncing a Nokia N95 with Ubuntu Lucid Lynx aka 10.4

griff.steni.us

Getting your SyncML phone working with Ubuntu just got a lot harder in their newest release, but fortunately it is still possible with a bit of work. In the latest release, they moved from libsoup 2.2 to 2.4 and didn’t leave the old version in the repositories, so to get it working, you need to download the .deb packages for karmic and install them side by side.

When installing libsyncml0, i had to install libwbxml2-0 which can be gotten from aptitude. Also there are a couple of other programs you should also get.

So, to get your phone working (in my case a Nokia Symbian 3rd edition phone) you need to do the following things.
aptitude install libwbxml2-0 multisync-tools multisync0.90 opensync-plugin- evolution

and then install the deb packages from the previous links in their listed order. From there on you can use hcitool scan to get the MAC address of your phone, and then sdptool browse MAC to make sure that your phone uses channel 10 for syncing with SyncML.

After you have that information you can go into multisync0.9 and add a phone group and fill in the information for bluetooth_channel and identifier which should be <bluetooth_address>00:00:00:00:00:00</bluetooth_address> and <identifier>PC Suite</identifier> respectively.

Also. be aware that my phone does not support syncing notes over SyncML so just expect calendar, tasks, and contacts to work.

At this point, I guess its a good time to point out that, canonical is in the process of rolling out its Ubuntu one service which will allow you to sync your phone over your carriers network but this requires a 10$ a month subscription and data service from your carrier. It would also be cynical of me to assume that they took out SyncML to persuade users to migrate over to Ubuntu one.