A beautiful friendship? Linux and Samsung SGH-D600

Alex Günsche · 30. Mai 2006

Dieser Beitrag stammt aus dem Webangebot des eingestellten ServerSite-Projekts. Da er oft über Suchmaschinen gefunden wird und vielfach verlinkt ist, habe ich ihn hier nochmal veröffentlicht. Er ist leider nur auf englisch verfügbar.

And now for something completely different: I managed to synchronize my Samsung SGH-D600 mobile phone with my Linux machine. I know there are many people who also want that, and I still haven’t found any useful resources on other websites. So I’m trying to outline here how to get the SGH-D600 to talk to Linux.

A brief history of my efforts: First, I tried to “detect” and mount the Phone’s internal memory. Samsung delivers a software package in order to do so, but that cr*p only runs on Windows. It doesn’t behave like a usual USB device; although it was detected as such by my system. So I tried to run Samsungs “PC Studio” with wine. I spent some hours until I gave up, totally upset and angry.

So I decided to spend some more money and get a microSD card, in order to have an additional reason to hate Samsung and their “What-is-that-Linux-you’re-talking-about”-attitude. It was detected directly as I put it into my SGH-D600, and the phone suggested to format it, which I allowed to happen. After that, I set the data transfer type to “Mass storage” (Settings -> Phone settings -> USB settings). Then I plugged it into my PC, and the phone said “USB now in use.” (It did that before, too; so I still wasn’t expecting too much.)

But then, I got the following (slightly adapted to fit layout):

# tail -n 20 /var/log/messages
usb 3-2: new full speed USB device using ohci_hcd and address 3
usb 3-2: configuration #3 chosen from 1 choice
scsi0 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
usb-storage: device found at 3
usb-storage: waiting for device to settle before scanning
Vendor: Model: Rev:
Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 00
SCSI device sda: 1983495 512-byte hdwr sectors (1016 MB)
sda: Write Protect is off
sda: Mode Sense: 00 6a 00 00
sda: assuming drive cache: write through
SCSI device sda: 1983495 512-byte hdwr sectors (1016 MB)
sda: Write Protect is off
sda: Mode Sense: 00 6a 00 00
sda: assuming drive cache: write through
sda: sda1
sd 0:0:0:0: Attached scsi removable disk sda
sd 0:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg0 type 0
usb-storage: device scan complete
scsi.agent[11755]: disk at /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:03.1/usb3/3-2/3-2:3.0/host0/target0:0:0/0:0:0:0

So the card actually was detected, whereas before my machine was barely able to detect some sort of storage device.
First, I tried to mount /dev/sda1, but all I got was some subdirectories with names consisting of but weird characters. So I unmounted it and mounted /dev/sda, and – behold! – I got a list of folders like “Images”, “Video”, “Music” etc.

Now I had to test if it would accept me changing the contents: I put one of my favourite albums into the “Music” folder and unmounted. Unmounting took very long, so I think the actual writing was performed there. Then I started the mp3 player integrated with the SGH-D600, and I got my favourite sound coming out of my cell phone.

I hope this encourages Linux users with the Samsung SGH-D600 to give it a try, too. What you need, are a few things: (1) a microSD (a.k.aTransflash) Card, (2) the (afaik always included) USB cable, and (3) a Linux kernel with support for plenty of USB and SCSI stuff. Especially important is the ohci support and “Probe all LUNs”, but they should be active on recent distros anyway. (Note: the device can also appear as /dev/sdb or somoething different. Check your /dev directory and /var/log/messages.)

Try out and have fun.

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