help with using my phone as a bluetooth modem

[Lardo]

I've recently switched over to Ubuntu 7.10 from Windows, but there's a couple of things I've been having a hard time doing on Linux. So far I've overcome most of my little obstacles but I haven't been able to find support on this one.

I'm using a Samsung A900 on sprint and I previously could connect it to my laptop to connect to the internet anywhere with cellphone reception. I had previously used
this guide I found over at SprintUsers.com. I was wondering if anyone has had experience getting this working on a Linux machine, or at least be able to point me in the right direction.

Thanks, Chris

[dilbert]

I can only tell what I've done recently on FreeBSD 6.2.

I bought a FreeBSD 6.2 compatible Bluetooth dongle and installed the Bluetooth daemon (already on FreeBSD 6.2) running on start-up.

Then I switched a newly bought Samsung phone on. It recognised immediately the PC and showed it hostname.

Then I had to look up a Bluetooth file on the PC with the passwords in it. Then I could enter the right password on the phone and got finally stuck with a missing list of Bluetooth services. I still haven't found the time to investigate this as our daughter needs mainly a facility to up and download files to and from the PC what she's doing now via a microSD card.

But I remember that a Modem connection is one of those Bluetooth services. I would simply try it using a Bluetooth dongle and trying to connect your phone.

[kakariko81280]

Ubuntu is pretty well set up for this kind of thing.

Plug in the dongle, and make your phone discoverable.

chris@angua:~$ hcitool scan
Scanning ...
        00:13:70:B0:BB:12       Cuddy

My phone is called Cuddy you will get different results. Next you need an rfcomm setup:

chris@angua:~$ cat /etc/bluetooth/rfcomm.conf
#
# RFCOMM configuration file.
#

rfcomm0 {
        # Automatically bind the device at startup
        bind no;

        # Bluetooth address of the device
        device 00:13:70:B0:BB:12;

        # RFCOMM channel for the connection
        channel 1;

        # Description of the connection
        comment "Nokia 6230i";
}

Naturally you'll have to update the settings to match what you got from hcitool before.

Next up, bind the connection:

chris@angua:~$ sudo rfcomm bind 0
chris@angua:~$ ls /dev/rfcomm0
/dev/rfcomm0

And use /dev/rfcomm0 as a standard com port. The rfcomm command is the only one that will need to be executed on the next reboot to reconnect your phone and computer. If you get any errors, post them here and we'll see what we can do.

Let us know how you get on,

Chris...