Blue your teeth

17. November 2007

Yesterday I finally decided to give Bluetooth a go and bought the cheapest available USB adapter at the local electronic store. I must say that I expected it just not to work at all on Linux or that I would have to spend the whole afternoon to get at least some things working.

Anyway, I just plugged in the adapter and checked dmesg to see what happens. To my surprise it just told me that the driver was loaded and the bluetooth stack was now ready. I fired up the gnome-bluetooth-applet and clicked on “Browse Device…” to just see my mobile phone being detected and connected to it. I could not browse the files at first because the gnome-vfs-obex module was not installed but installing it fixed it.

After being able to browse my files I wanted to check if there is a way to sync my phone. After I checked that the phone (Sony Ericsson K530i) does not support SyncML I did not really expect to get anything going.

But as I wanted to give it a try for a long time, I first migrated from Thunderbird to Evolution to have a PIM-Suite and to have syncing support at all. Migrating is actually a real pain because you have to import all your folders manually but in the end it worked out. I have used Thunderbird/Netscape my whole mail live (about since 1994) and I still think that it is a good mail client. But Evolution is really better integrated into the GNOME Desktop and it has improved a lot since I last checked in those old 1.4 days. It could be a bit faster though and I found a nasty bug for people using small screens like me.

So back to syncing: I installed multisync after googling a bit what I need and added a synchronisation pair with Evolution and an “IRMC Mobile Device” (guessed that because some other Sony Ericsson phones were in the list). After clicking on “Sync” I expected an error message but instead the phone just synced.

So thanks a lot to anyone being involved in those Bluetooth and sync stuff – it’s really great!

3 Responses to “Blue your teeth”

  1. Victor Osadci Says:

    Is there a way to use a SyncML phone ? I remember that it was hopeless when I got my SyncML capable SE.

  2. jhs Says:

    I think it should also work (so I haven’t tried due to lack of hardware). Maybe have a look here:

    http://www.harald-hoyer.de/linux_and_syncml_multisync_with_nokia_6280

  3. Victor Osadci Says:

    It seems that SE is using some non-standard stuff in their UIQ3 devices. Their sotware has been getting worse over the years, and it is a shame. I’ll try nokia for my next phone.


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