Steven Van Acker

E-mail: steven AT singularity DOT be
Gothenburg, Sweden

GSM connectivity over bluetooth

03 Jun 2007 Allright, it's been a while since I've actively worked on my new laptop installation.
Now that my laundry is done, my laptop is backed up and I reinstalled ubuntu with a working(!) CD-R, I'm ready to document how I can connect to my GSM from my laptop using bluetooth.

Remember, I want to do the following things:


[Reminder: I need to set the default colors of the gnome terminal to white-on-black, or install the multi-gnome-terminal instead]

I'm starting by installing both gnome-phone-manager and bluez-gnome, since they worked nicely before.

Now, in order to get gnome-phone-manager to work, I need to set up the /dev/rfcomm0 device. In my previous setup, I had to edit a configfile manually for that. (/etc/bluetooth/rfcomm.conf)

Before I do that, let's see if I can find my GSM phone. I've set it to be visible to others over bluetooth and inititated a scan with "hcitool scan".
And whaddayaknow, it show up!

Because this is a walkthrough, I'll show off a few commands to play around with.

The "sdptool" command can be used to browse all services on a bluetooth device, or search for a specific service on all bluetooth devices in range (very handy).
It will show, for example, which devices support dialup networking, OBEX file transfers or serialport functionality. My GSM has all those things :)

I started "bluetooth-applet" manually into background, because I'd have to restart X in order for it to start otherwise (why is that anyway ?)
Next, I've edited /etc/bluetooth/rfcomm.conf and uncommented to rfcomm0 section, inserted my GSM's "mac-address" and description.
I also executed "/etc/init.d/bluetooth restart" to let the changes take effect.

I had expected to see a /dev/rfcomm0 device appear, but it doesn't...

I forgot to set "bind" to "yes" in /etc/bluetooth/rfcomm.conf, and restart /etc/init.b/bluetooth.
Now there is a /dev/rfcomm0 device.

I also installed gnome-bluetooth to be able to send files from my laptop to GSM using bluetooth, from the gnome menus. "Send to" in the right-click dropdown menu now has an "Bluetooth (OBEX push)" option.

To receive files from my GSM on my laptop, I installed "obexpushd". It needs to be started in the directory that I want the files to be written to. It works nicely, but I'd prefer a GUI version somehow...

It gets even better. There is a package called "gnome-vfs-obexftp" which can "mount" a bluetooth device like my GSM and show it in nautilus.
Now I can just drag and drop from/to my GSM like any other folder.

Allright, I think I've experimented enough so far.
I can now send and receive files to and from my GSM. Time to fixate this blurby documentation into a decent guide before I move on to the SMS sending/receiving.

Writing this guide will require me to reinstall Ubuntu (so I can test my documentation on a fresh installation, my standard documentating procedure), so I will be doing dished in the meantime (Yes, I'm merely human aswell ;)