Access Your Phone Via Bluetooth With Ubuntu Gutsy

After a friend gave me a new laptop, I quickly installed Ubuntu on it, and though I knew it was pretty good about hardware detection, I expected to have to fight to get WiFi and Bluetooth to work, but since it detected everything at install, I decided to try to use it to manage the info on my LG VX8300 wireless phone over Bluetooth. Come to find out, as with most things in Ubuntu, it’s not that hard!

Here’s how to do it.

Edit the configuration file. Set the security to auto and change the passkey.
sudo gedit /etc/bluetooth/hcid.conf
Restart the Bluetooth service.
sudo /etc/init.d/bluetooth restart
Righ-click on the Bluetooth icon.
Click Preferences and match to the settings below. Your adapter name will be different.
On your phone, go to the Bluetooth menu and pair it with your computer. You’ll need the passkey you set earlier, but as this will work differently for different phones, I won’t get into details about this here.
After pairing, put your phone in Discoverable mode and get the MAC address.
hcitool scan
Find out what channel the BTdiag service is on. Here’s where you use your phone’s MAC address.
sdptool browse 01:23:45:67:89:XX

You’re looking for a section like this.

Service Name: BT DIAG

Service RecHandle: 0x10005

Service Class ID List:

"Serial Port" (0x1101)

Protocol Descriptor List:

"L2CAP" (0x0100)

"RFCOMM" (0x0003)

Channel: 16

Language Base Attr List:

code_ISO639: 0x656e

encoding: 0x6a

base_offset: 0x100

Profile Descriptor List:

"Serial Port" (0x1101)
Create a serial connection to the phone over Bluetooth. Remember this command; you’ll need to use it to connect to the phone in the future. You might want to create a script to run it for you. Remember to use your own MAC address and whatever channel the BT DIAG service is on.
rfcomm connect 0 01:23:45:67:89:XX 16