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.

4 thoughts on “Talking to a mobile from Linux

  1. Hi there. I am having problems. I have looked on the KMobileTools howto and followed the advice you describe above, it says ‘Can’t create device: address already in use’. I use Kubuntu Dapper and can browse to the phone’s files (photos, pictures, music) from konqueror. I can already drag and drop files in both directions, which is great. But I need KMobileTools so I can manage the contact list (and synchronise it), diary, etc – and send and receive sms messages. I can’t do that without KMobileTools. I can use Gnome Phone Manager 0.7 to send texts, so something must be connected to something! I feel so near yet so far. Any comments gratefully received.

    Regards, Will

  2. Sadly Will I no longer have that phone and I’ve not really tried since getting my new Sharp phone to get it to talk to it. I did have a brief go but had no success and not got around to having another try. I really should do as it’d be nice to have a backup of it!

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