This guide will describe how to configure your Linux system to recognize a Motorola SLVR L7 phone and configure it to work with Amarok. This will allow you to add/remove songs and playlists to the iTunes portion of this phone. If you have any questions regarding this guide please contact me at http://sqls.net/contact This does not cover syncing your phone with evolution or any other types of management.
The versions shown here are not a hard requirement. But I am showing them to give you a frame of reference of the system I completed this on.
* Gateway desktop with Intel Pentium(R) D CPU 2.80GHz * Linux Kernel 2.6.22-gentoo-r5 #14 SMP * Amarok 1.4.6-r1
You need USB storage device and vfat filesystem support. There's a good chance you already have them enabled. But below is what you need either compiled into your kernel or built as modules. If you need help on configuring and compiling your kernel and modules please look else where - There's tons of examples for your distribution at http://www.google.com
Navigate to Device Drivers >> USB support USB support| [M] USB device filesystem <M> USB Mass Storage support The above is suppose to automatically enable SCSI and SCSI Disk Support - But, you might go look and check.
Navigate to Device Drivers >> SCSI device support SCSI device support| --- SCSI device support <*> SCSI disk support
Now, finally. We need vfat support.
Navigate to File systems >> DOS/FAT/NT Filesystems DOS/FAT/NT Filesystems| <*> VFAT (Windows-95) fs support
If you compiled all the above as modules you could simple load them. If you already had them you can just continue. Otherwise please reboot with your new kernel.
Now lets see if it works! Plug in your phone via the usb cord and type
# dmesg
If you get something along the lines of …
usb 4-1: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 13 usb 4-1: configuration #1 chosen from 2 choices scsi20 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices usb-storage: device found at 13 usb-storage: waiting for device to settle before scanning scsi 20:0:0:0: Direct-Access Motorola Motorola Phone 2.31 PQ: 0 ANSI: 2 sd 20:0:0:0: [sdd] 990976 512-byte hardware sectors (507 MB) sd 20:0:0:0: [sdd] Write Protect is off sd 20:0:0:0: [sdd] Mode Sense: 0b 00 00 08 sd 20:0:0:0: [sdd] Assuming drive cache: write through
Then you should be set. As you can see it detected the phone as a usb storage device and assigned it to /dev/sdd. It may assign it to a different “device” such as /dev/sda, /dev/sdc, /dev/sdd, etc.
This is mostly optional. You can update the phone without this step entirely. But it makes things nicer. If you are not using udev then just skip this. What we'll do is create a udev rule that will create a symlink of “slvr” to the phone device each time it is detected. So from now on you can just reference /dev/slvr as the phone device. Since it's a USB device and you might have other USB storage devices plugged in at any given time this insures you can use the same name to point to it, everytime.
Create a file '/etc/udev/rules.d/slvr.rules' (There is a chance your rules folder is located elsewhere, please be sure to use the correct place for your distribution) and inside of that file put this string.
BUS==“usb”, SYSFS(manufacturer)==“Motorola Inc.”, SYSFS(product)==“Motorola Phone (L7 iTunes)”, KERNEL==“sd??”, MODE=“0600”, SYMLINK+=“slvr”
Now restart udev.
# udevstart
'NOTE:' From this point on I am going to reference the phone at the device node of '/dev/slvr' if you skipped this step for whatever reason just keep in mind the actual device node of your phone. Which should be something like /etc/sdc, /etc/sdd.
We need to mount the phone to the linux filesystem and to do that, we need a place to mount it. So,
# mkdir /mnt/slvr
Lets add an entry into the '/etc/fstab' table to allow users to mount the device easily. This is how it should look.
/dev/slvr /mnt/slvr vfat noauto,user,flush 0 0
Notice the flush flag. I had issues with Amarok flushing the cache data properly to the phone and caused cut off songs. This flush option tells the OS to flush data after writes. It's suppose to be safe for USB devices and you are encouraged to read about it yourself. I found it to be very useful.
Now lets try it out. See if you can mount the device.
$ mount /mnt/slvr
Now if we take a look, we should see two folders.
$ ls /mnt/slvr/
iTunes mobile
If you do not already have Amarok installed you will need to do this - or if you do not have it compiled with the appropriate flags. I am using a Gentoo system that uses “USE flags”. Your system may have some other method of setting the compile time options for a package. I encourage you to research how it works on your distribution. You need to have Amarok compiled with ipod support at the very least - but you may want some of these other features as well.
So first, lets set what use flags we'll be using
# echo "media-sound/amarok aac ipod kde misucbrainz mysql opengl visualizations" >> /etc/portage/package.use
Now lets emerge amarok. # emerge -vat amarok
Once you have Amarok setup and running we can add the SLVR to it. There's two methods, automatic discovery and manual. I used a manual setup because I wanted it named something specific and not the device names such as /dev/sdd1.
So open up Amarok and click on 'Settings' then 'Configure Amarok'. The Amarok config window should open up. On the left hand side select the icon titled 'Media Devices'. Next click on 'Add Device'. Another window will open. On the dropdown titled 'Select the plugin to use with this device:' choose 'Apple iPod Media Device'. For the next field 'Enter a name for this device' put any name you wish to describe your SLVR as. I used 'My SLVR'. The last field 'Enter the mount point of the device' enter the mount point - We used '/mnt/slvr' in this guide. Now click 'OK' then click 'OK' again to exit the Amarok config window.
Now back on the main Amarok page. On the left hand side there should be (unless you hid it, if so - I assume you know how to unhide it) a tab labeled 'Devices' - Click on that tab. If you still have the phone mounted Amarok should have already connected to it. Either way. Up top just below the Amarok tool bar there is another set of icons. One should look like a small wrench and if you hover the mouse over it, it should display “Configure device” Click on that. A window will open up with two text fields at the top half of it. These are the Connect and Disconnect commands amarok will use. We want the 'Pre-connect commant:' to read 'mount /mnt/slvr' and the 'Post-disconnect command:' to read 'umount /mnt/slvr' - Click 'OK' and you should be done. You can try connecting/disconnecting (via the icons just below the Amarok main toolbar) and everything should work.
To actually get music on the phone just drag the songs from an Amarok playlist over to the Phone device tab. Then click Transfer from the device toolbar.
I have WMA,AAC,MP3,MP4, and FLAC files in Amarok. My SLVR can't really handle all of those. Also I've noticed if you shove some high bit-rate MP3 files it will choke on them as well. Now this is rough.. But open up the Scripts interface in Amarok and install dirtxcode “Quick and Dirty XCode” transcoder. I had to modify mine to get it to work with my system. You need gstreamer installed with the flac/lame/id3v2 plugins. Then edit the ipod config and have it transcode the files whenever possible. Tada!
I did a lot of messing around and toying with my phone. If you need to, you can reformat the phone as a FAT system either under windows or with mkfs.vfat under Linux. Amarok will try to rebuild the device but it failed each time for me so I had to connect it to a Windows system with iTunes once to rebuild the iTunes folders and files on the newly formated filesystem.