chewearn's blog

Ubuntu Hardy 8.04 introduced a number of improvements to bluetooth support. Recently, I have been testing a few of these functionalities and found that they now worked easily with very little hacks.

Bluetooth devices

Items used:

1. eeePC 900 running fully updated Ubuntu Hardy 8.04.1 i386
2. Nokia N95 8GB
3. Chronos USB2.0 Bluetooth V2.1 mini dongle

Set up bluetooth in Hardy

There is very little to do here. Plug the bluetooth dongle into the eeePC. The device is recognized automatically and ready for use.

An icon (the bluetooth logo) will appear in the notification area. Right-click on it and select “Preferences”. There is actually nothing that you need to change here. Just make sure the “Mode of operation” is selected to “Other devices can connect”. A screenshot is shown further below.

Side note:
For completeness, here is the output of “lsusb” for the bluetooth dongle

Bus 002 Device 002:
ID 0a12:0001 Cambridge Silicon Radio, Ltd
Bluetooth Dongle (HCI mode)

For the paranoid, you can edit /etc/bluetooth/hcid.conf file as follow (though I am not sure how this would help).

Locate the line with

security user

change to

security auto

And locate the line with

passkey "1234"

change “1234″ to a random code.

Turn on bluetooth in Nokia N95

Select the bluetooth icon in your N95 and turn it on. Set the “My phone’s visibility” to “Shown to all”. Afterwards, you can changed it to “Hidden” if you were worried about bluetooth security.

Pairing

Now it’s time to pair the N95 to the eeePC. Right-click on the notification area’s bluetooth icon, select “Browse device…”

You phone should appear in the list. Select it and click ‘Connect”. You will be asked for a four digits pin number in both the phone and the eeePC. Enter the same pin on both sides. It doesn’t matter what the actual number is; just use a random number.

The devices should now be connected and three things will happen. First, a phone icon should appear in your desktop.

Second, a file manager window should appear with the contents of the N95.

Third, your phone should now be shown inside the bluetooth’s “Preferences” dialogbox.

Select the phone and click “Set trusted”. Go to the N95′s bluetooth screen, select the eeePC and enable “Set as authorized.”

The pairing is now completed and the devices would always be able to “see” each other. From here on, you can revert the bluetooth on both the N95 and eeePC to “hidden” to improve security.

What you can do

With the N95 and eeePC now paired through bluetooth, you can transfer files both ways, and use the N95 as a 3G modem for the eeePC internet connectivity. I will describe these in future posts.