Sunday, June 14, 2009

New Phone + Airtel mobile office + wvdial

So in the last one week I got a new phone ( Nokia 7210c Supernova) to develop / test the J2ME app that I am making as a part of Google Summer Of Code. The phone is a relatively basic model with Edge, J2ME ( :) ) and bluetooth. Me being what I am .. was fiddling around with the phone and some of the Airtel services. The basic Airtel GPRS service called Airtel live provides internet access through a proxy => Apps which don't support proxy fail ( >90% ). I went searching for ways to have Airtel Mobile Office activated after considerble amount of searching I was able to activate the mobile office by dailing *567*1# and following the instructions that followed, If the settings don't arrive in a day repeat the instructions in the SMS that follows the number dial, note that it costs 30 paise per 50kB on Airtel Prepaid.

This was followed by the installation of jmIrc and MidpSSH for that occasional itch to do something weird while on the move. People who know the rough amount of data that is sent during IRC will know that you can chat for ~1 hour with the 50 kB data transfer :) . After this the usual Opera mini , Google maps were tried and of course setting configuring the phones mailbox to send mail through my gmail account.

Today morning I had the weird urge to connect to the internet through my phone over bluetooth :D. The KDE4 bluetooth apps are as not the best ones out there :) , so I ended up installing blueman . Paired my phone and then selected the Dial Up Networking ( DUN ) in the device manager window, it asks for the root pass and walah you have a /dev/rfcomm0 ( There are other ways of binding the rfcomm through command line but GUI sometimes is simpler :) ). This was followed by searching for settings to connect to the internet , here are the things I did to get the internet working through the phone.

1) Install wvdial
2) edit /etc/wvdial.conf


[Dialer GPRS]
Modem = /dev/rfcomm0
Baud = 115200
Dial Command = ATDT
Init1 = ATZ
Init2 = AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","airtelgprs.com";
FlowControl = None
Username= internet
Password= internet
Phone = *99***1#


The username and pass can be anything ( they are not validated )

3) As root run wvdial GPRS

4) Tadaa you are connected to the internets

Code highlighting courtesy : http://lukabloga.blogspot.com/2008/10/to-test-new-highlighting.html

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