Programs needed

To establish a connection between the mobile phone and my computer I have used bluetooth. Therefore you need to have a kernel with the BlueZ bluetooth protocol stack enabled and a few utilities installed:

• bluez-utils: commandline programs to use bluetooth under linux.
• bluez-pin: This program asks for a pin when connecting a bluetooth device.
• obexftp and obexserver: programs for copying files from and to the mobile phone.
• gnokii and libgnokii: This program can access and change the addressbook and other data on the mobile phone.

Testing the connection

The first step is to check with hciconfig if the linux kernel can access the bluetooth hardware. hciconfig should output something like this:

hci0: Type: USB
BD Address: 00:AA:BB:CC:DE:AB ACL MTU: 192:8 SCO MTU: 64:8
UP RUNNING PSCAN ISCAN
RX bytes:71711 acl:1680 sco:0 events:1473 errors:0
TX bytes:42883 acl:1299 sco:0 commands:96 errors:0

Now you can invoke hcitool scan to scan for bluetooth devices. This programm lists the devices near the pc and their BD address. You should write down the mobile phone BD address, because you will need it a few times.

If the phone is not listed, you should check if bluetooth in the phone is enabled. Or perhaps there is a problem with your bluetooth hardware under linux.