Talking to a mobile from Linux

Fab – just figured out how to talk to my Motorola V525 from Linux.

The standard KDE bluetooth tools sort of work, but the v525 is notorious for not quite doing bluetooth correctly, and so whilst I could pair with the phone and do some rudimentary browsing of the services the phone offered I couldn’t get access to the address book or SMS messages.

So I went digging around and found KMobileTools which, after a bit of faffing about, worked!

The faffing about that was necessary was:

  • Rebuilding the source deb package for Ubuntu Breezy with KDE 3.5 RC1 (their package is built against Debian Sid)
  • sudo mknod /dev/rfcomm0 c 216 0
  • sudo ln -s /dev/rfcomm0 /dev/mobile
  • Find the MAC address of the phone by doing hcitool scan
  • Bind the phone to the device with sudo rfcomm bind 0 [mac-address]
  • Run kmobiletools

As people have pointed out, this would be so much easier with a wizard such as the one provided by K3B to configure CD/DVD burners, but given the software is at 0.4.3.1 it’s pretty amazing!

So far I can access my phone directory, dial/answer/hang-up voice calls and send/receive/save text SMS’s (interestingly a PXT looks like a pathname on a server somewhere). There’s no access to files, but the developer is looking interestedly at the Motorola 4 Linux project which is aiming for remote filesystem access to Motorola phones.