9.4 Sending a Fax

You can send a fax from your cell phone if both your cellular carrier and your cell phone support it. You can figure out quickly whether your phone supports it by making a Kermit connection (see Section 9.3 earlier in this chapter). Here's a session with a Motorola v120e in which the phone acknowledges that it's capable of Class 2 fax modem commands:

 bjepson@debian:~$  kermit -l /dev/ttyACM0 -b 115200  C-Kermit 7.0.196, 1 Jan 2000, for Linux  Copyright (C) 1985, 2000,   Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York. Type ? or HELP for help. (/home/bjepson/) C-Kermit>  connect  Connecting to /dev/ttyACM0, speed 115200. The escape character is Ctrl-\ (ASCII 28, FS) Type the escape character followed by C to get back, or followed by ? to see other options. ----------------------------------------------------  AT+FCLASS=?  0,2.0     OK 

However, the following session with the Nokia 6200 shows that it doesn't have any fax modem capabilities:

 bjepson@debian:~$  kermit -l /dev/ttyUSB0 -b 115200  C-Kermit 7.0.196, 1 Jan 2000, for Linux  Copyright (C) 1985, 2000,   Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York. Type ? or HELP for help. (/home/bjepson/) C-Kermit>  set carrier-watch off # required for some phones  (/home/bjepson/) C-Kermit>  connect  Connecting to /dev/ttyUSB0, speed 115200. The escape character is Ctrl-\ (ASCII 28, FS) Type the escape character followed by C to get back, or followed by ? to see other options. ----------------------------------------------------  AT+FCLASS=?  0     OK 

To send a fax with your cell phone, install a package such as efax (http://www.cce.com/efax/) and configure it for your modem. In the case of efax, you must edit /etc/efax.rc . At a minimum, you should set the device (DEV), your phone number (FROM), and name ( NAME ):

 DEV=  ttyACM0  # Your fax number in international format, 20 characters maximum. # Use only digits, spaces, and the "+" character.     FROM="  [phone]  "     # Your name as it should appear on the page header.     NAME="  Brian Jepson  " 

Once you've done this, you can use a client program, such as fax (included as part of the efax package), to send a file:

 bjepson@debian:~$  fax send 4015555678 Letter.ps  Letter.ps is postscript or pdf ... efax: Sun Nov 23 16:39:16 2003 efax v 0.9a-001114 Copyright 1999 Ed Casas efax: 39:16 opened /dev/ttyACM0 efax: 39:21 using in class 2.0 efax: 39:22 dialing T4015555678 efax: 39:43 remote ID -> "        401 555 5678" efax: 39:43 connected efax: 39:51 session 196lpi  4800bps 8.5"/215mm 11"/A4 1D    -     -  0ms efax: 39:51 header:[2003/11/23 16:39 [phone] Brian Jepson p. 1/1] efax: 41:52 sent 20+2156 lines, 61097+0 bytes, 121 s  4039 bps efax: 41:52 sent -> Letter.ps.001 efax: 41:57 done, returning 0 (success)