BitPim is an application that lets you manipulate data on certain LG phones such as LG-Vu (which I upgraded to recently). LG-Vu is a great touch screen phone which can do a lot more things than my previous Nokia phone. Best of all mobile Java applications can be installed on the phone.

In order to install applications we need to either download the applications from AT&T app store directly to the phone (using a data plan) or some how access the data in the phone using a data cable. With the right data cable one can access the phone data using BitPim application.

BitPim is a cross platform application that can run in Windows Vista, Windows XP, Mac and Linux. Unfortunately it took a little more effort to install it and to make it see the data on my cellphone. Once installed the application failed to start due to a missing shared library called libexpat.so.0. The problem can be fixed by installing the package expat. If the library is already installed a symbolic link to /lib/libexpat.so.1.5.2 (which was the current version of the library on my 64bit version of Fedora 10) can be created with the name libexpat.so.0 in /usr/lib and that should fix the problem.

The second problem that I faced was with the communication port. BitPim was unable to find a USB port on my computer that was available to communicate with the phone. I guess due to security reasons the normal user was denied this access and hence by running as root I was able to get the com port open. BitPim help documents do not recommend you to run the application to run as root. Follow the instructions here to have appropriate privileges to run as a normal user.

The port that was available for communication was recognized as USB modem connection with the device being /dev/ttyACM0. Unfortunately with this port I was not able to get the basic information from the phone when the Phone Info button was clicked. The log entries showed time-outs while communicating using the port. After struggling to find the exact problem, I came to realized that the problem was due to the library libusb. I had to install the libusb(i386) version of the library. Once the library was installed all the problems were fixed and BitPim was able to communicate with my phone without any trouble.

The communication port has to be configured manually for LG-Vu. In order to access LG-Vu phones,LG VX-8700 has to be chosen as the phone model and I choose an open usb port usb::004::009::2 having the following description USB Device - Vendor LG Electroncs, Product VX Series Phone (Direct USB connection), (Interface Diagnostics Interface) as the port for communication. My BitPim port listing is shown below.

BitPim port listing - Tue Feb 17 13:47:14 2009

There is one other issue that may arise in Fedora machines. Today (one day after installing BitPim) I got an error while staring the application: Fatal Python error: cannot get zipimporter instance Aborted. Apparently it is due to a prelink application task. The simplest way is to disable or uninstall the application prelink and then by reinstalling BitPim. Or prelink can be configured to ignore BitPim. The way to do the latter is available here.

Right now I haven't really played a lot with BitPim to mod my phone. Look out for future posts where I intend to describe some of the moding that I carry out on my phone.