Bluetooth woes, losing hair

[Marius Gedminas]

On Wed, Jan 23, 2008 at 10:03:20PM +0000, Richard Cheesman wrote:
> After a couple of weeks of being patient, reading many posts about 'how 
> bluetooth in Ubuntu is easier than Vista', I give up.

Never seen Vista, but Bluetooth in Ubuntu ain't quite there yet.

> I have a bluetooth dongle for my Ubuntu box (Gutsy), and would like to 
> connect my Palm T|X and Motorola V3i to it.  Possibly to sync data, or 
> just for filesharing.

I had Bluetooth hotsync working between my laptop and my Palm Tungsten T.
It was rather painful to setup (partially because PalmOS was buggy and
did nice things like swap the byte order of IP addresses used for
network sync).  In the end I made my laptop pretend it's a phone and
provide a PPP dialup server over bluetooth, so that I could use network
hotsync on the Palm.  It worked fine (about 10x slower than hotsync
over USB, but at least I didn't need to fiddle with any cables).

I could try to recreate the steps I used to set this up from memory and
old laptop backups (I stopped using my Palm once I bought a Nokia
internet tablet, and lost the configs when I installed a fresh OS on a
new laptop), but I've no way to verify this would work with a Palm TX.
You may be better off looking for a newer HOWTO somewhere on the web
(maybe on the pilot-link website).

> I constantly get a Could not find Obex//  etc error.

Again, I've no direct experience with Palm TX.  Previous Palms didn't
support OBEX FTP and were rather picky in their OBEX PUSH support.

I've no idea about the Motorola V3i.  Phones usually support OBEX FTP.
Ubuntu doesn't, by default -- you need to install the gnome-vfs-obexftp
package.

After I've installed gnome-vfs-obexftp, I'm able to browse the files on
my phone (Nokia 6125) by right-clicking the Bluetooth icon in the
notification area, selecting Browse Device..., making sure my phone is
discoverable, choosing it from the list, and pressing the Connect...
button.

On Wed, Jan 23, 2008 at 10:13:45PM +0000, Richard Cheesman wrote:
> And... doing 'hcitool dev' on the CLI produces a mac address completely 
> different to that of the Palm (my primary connection problem)

Which is perfectly fine because very Bluetooth device has its own unique
MAC address.

If you want to see whether your computer sees the Palm, run hcitool
scan (after making sure the Palm is discoverable).

HTH,
Marius Gedminas
-- 
C, n:
        A programming language that is sort of like Pascal except more like
        assembly except that it isn't very much like either one, or anything
        else.  It is either the best language available to the art today, or
        it isn't.
                -- Ray Simard
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