Accessing GSM SIM-Cards under Ubuntu

I borrowed a cheap GSM SIM-card reader and tried to use it under Ubuntu. The "Zolid" card reader is both a memory-card reader as well as a SIM card reader. The device presents itself to Ubuntu as follows (including the typo):

$lsusb
Bus 001 Device 005: ID 0bda:0169 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. Mass Stroage Device

The 'Mass Storage Driver' that mounts SD cards just works fine out-of-the-box. I concentrated my experiments on the SIM-card reader. I installed the 'MonoSIM' application to access the device.

• http://www.integrazioneweb.com/monosim/
• install the debian package. After some google-ing, I found a package at http://linux.softpedia.com/progDownload/monosim-Download-27949.html
• under ubuntu, the package installer is automatically triggered and all associated packages (like libmono) are installed if needed
• make sure the 'pcscd" smartcard daemon package is installed - check with Synaptic

In Applications/Office you can run the MonoSIM application and manage all phone numbers on it.

Some scripts that might be useful:

• combine the 'monosim' file records to 1 line per record
  $ cat *mono* | while read a; do read b; echo "$a;$b"; done | sort -u > gsm.csv
  
• I used OpenOffice to filter out old lines and save the file back to csv
  
• converting the csv back to the 'monosim' format:
  $ while read a
  do
  echo $a | cut -d '"' -f 2
  echo $a | cut -d '"' -f 4
  done < gsm.csv > gsm.csv.monosim
  

The MonoSIM application works fine; the trick is to reconnect whenever a menu-item is greyed out.

see also: http://www.barrydegraaff.tk/index.php?page=files/Archive/Linux%20Sim%20Card%20reader/index.html