Wed, 13 Feb 2008

Phone, Bluetooth, Ubuntu, X60

Trying to connect my new mobile, a Sony Ericsson S500i, to my laptop. The phone doesn't have infrared but Bluetooth. (Last spring I had some success connecting my Nokia 6020 via infrared.) Thierry Nicola has some useful hints on his nice blog, William Brown Street.

bluez-utils was already installed. Turning on the Bluetooth device was no problem (as root: echo enable > /proc/acpi/ibm/bluetooth). After I started the Bluetooth services (sudo /etc/init.d/bluetooth restart), a Bluetooth icon popped up in my panel - lovely to behold! hciconfig -a showed me that the device on the computer works fine. hidd --search didn't produce any output (other than "Searching ...") so I tried hcitool scan instead, which gave me the address and name of my phone. Excellent!

However, with hidd -connect (with the address of the phone) I got: "Can't get device information: host is down". Will I be able to get beyond this point? Is the S500i to new for Ubuntu 7.10?

Unsurprisingly, the Bluetooth connection was up and running (in both directions) within seconds between the phone and B.'s MacBook. I can even use the phone as a remote control for the computer.

Posted on 13 Feb 2008 at 11:49 in /technology/phone. -- Permalink