Ubuntu, bluetooth, and the E70

A few quick notes on connecting a phone (in this case the venerable Nokia E70, the last with the excellent gull-wing keyboard design) to ubuntu via bluetooth.

Assuming the kernel modules and all necessary utilities (bluetooth, bluez, obexftp, obexfs, obecpushd, obex-data-server, irda-utils, cobex, gammi, kbluetooth) are installed, the first step is to create an rfcomm device:

mknod /dev/rfcomm0 c 216 0

Next, bind the device to the phone's bluetooth MAC address:

sudo rfcomm bind 0 00:12:D1:AD:FD:5E

The MAC address can be obtained using

hcitool scan

Note that the link and the bind have to be performed at boot; the file /etc/bluetooth/rfcomm.conf can be modified to perform this (it contains a sufficiently clear example).

Once these steps are performed, utilities like cobex and kbluetooth should just work.

With the E70, though, they don't, so it's necessary to use Obex to get data to and from the device.

The standard, longhand way to do this is with obex-ftp:

obexftp -b $MAC_ADDR -B 11 -l

The -b option is the bluetooth MAC address; the -B option is the channel (usually 10 or 11), and the -l option is the command to execute (ls). The man page lists commands.

Better that obexftp is obexfs, which mounts the phone as a filesystem:

mkdir ~/e70
obexfs -b $MAC_ADDR -B 11 ~/e70

This mounts the phone at the mount point ~/e70, where its phone and MMC memory can be accessed directly.