OpenOBEX For Linux

OpenOBEX is an open source and freely distributed command-line software implemented in C and designed from the offset as a set of four tools aimed to help users exchange binary objects between devices using the Object Exchange (OBEX) protocol.

If you’re wondering what OBEX is, we can tell you that it’s a session protocol, or a binary HTTP protocol optimized for ad-hoc wireless links. It can be used for Infrared, TCP/IP and Bluetooth connections.

By design, OBEX can be find in many mobile device, built-in on PDAs and old or modern mobile phones like Nokia 9110 Communicator, Sony-Ericsson, or Siemens, as well as scanners, such as HP CapShare 920.

The OpenOBEX project is distributed only as a TAR archive, which contains the program’s source code. To install it on your GNU/Linux machine, first check if the package exists in the main software repositories of your distribution, simply by opening the default package manager app and searching for OpenOBEX.

If you’re distro comes with no binary packages for OpenOBEX, you must download the latest version from Softpedia or the official website, save the archive on your computer, extract its contents, open a terminal emulator and navigate to the location of the extracted archive files with the ‘cd’ command.

To configure/optimize the program for a specific hardware architecture, type the ‘cmake .’ command in the terminal window, followed by the ‘make’ command to compile the source code. Finally, after a successful compilation, you can install OpenOBEX system wide by running the ‘make install’ command as root or the ‘sudo make install’ command as a privileged user.

After installation, four commands will be added to your /bin folder: obex-check-device, obex_find, obex_tcp and obex_text. The most important one is obex_tcp, which comes with various commands that can be viewed at a glance by typing ‘help’ at the command prompt.