Today my bluetooth adapter turned up today, after ordering it from trademe. With much anticipation, I plugged in into my Mandriva 2008.1 laptop, and after installing the bluetooth tools and kbluetooth, could see other computers and

phones, and connected to my phone by obex and downloaded the photo’s from it. However, what I purchased it for was to use the internet over my phone, via GPRS. I first tried this on my Eee PC, as that’s the first computer I wanted to use it with. I friend at work had got it going a few days ago, so I figured it can’t be too hard.. although it did take him quite some time.

Tonight must have been my lucky night, because I ended up fixing my sisters Eee PC, and while I was looking around, bumped into a script from 3eportal for the Eee PC that automatically configure it for GPRS. It consisted of a deb, which didn’t work. But, it worked enough, that I could make it work. It put an icon on the desktop, and ran a config script. The script had some issues, as it didn’t actually work in places, but I could see what it was trying to do. What it did was startup bluetooth, find my phone, ask me for a passkey for pairing, then configure /etc/bluetooth/hcid.conf and /etc/bluetooth/rfcomm.conf. It then asked for an APN and configured a GPRS dialup script that came with it. It asked me to pair my phone with the laptop, and tried to add the services to be started, in the Eee PC’s /usr/sbin/services.sh script.

The item it added on the menu was a simple toggle icon, that would run pon 3egprs or, if it was running, would run poff 3egprs. It also added the config script to the menu, which is not that brilliant, because if you run the config script again, it makes the same changes twice to some files, which will cause breakage. If I get time, I’ll submit a patch for it.

After getting this all configured, it worked! I was pretty surprised, but it just started working very well. The tricky bit was getting my phone to bond with the laptop, which I found was just me not driving the phone correctly.

Tomorrows task. Make it work with Mandriva.. which should be easy now I know what files to edit. Does anyone know of an automatic script to configure GPRS over bluetooth with Mandriva? Maybe I should port this deb to an RPM.

UPDATE: I've found the Mandriva way, via drakconnect, and it works.. with some effort.. next post will cover what I found. Thanks for the comments.