Mobile phone data connection?

[Havin_it]

Hello,

 

This might be a bit of a lost cause, but I thought I'd ask. I just got a new phone, Motorola RAZR V3 (why yes, I am a ponce, thankyou) which can data-connect to to a Windows PC via cabling or Bluetooth (I've only tried the cable as I have no Bluetooth hardware).

 

I just wondered whether there might be ways to access the phone under Linux? The bundled Windows software gives pretty complete access to the phone's functions, including GPRS data calls (the main interest for me) and arbitrary file in/out (hey, a new portable drive!) but Windows basically treats it as a winmodem, which is obviously a bit worrying from a Linux point of view.

 

I don't know too much about the OS of the phone, but something called 'Flex' is mentioned, and it also has Java though I don't know whether this encompasses the whole OS or just a component.

 

Any info, or pointers to general knowledge-bases that might help me in this area, much appreciated.

[DragonMage]

Hmm... it depends on the phone or datacable really. If the phone or datacable is detected and compatible with Linux, then you can use data connection, even dialup via GPRS (or CDMA dialup). In fact, I am using a dialup method in Linux using CDMA cellphone right now :)

 

Take a look at these links for more information.

 

http://kotinetti.suomi.net/mcfrisk/linux_gprs.html

http://tuxmobil.org/phones_linux.html

 

Anyway, I have a feeling that bluetooth has more chance of being supported than data cable. Buying a linux compatible bluetooth dongle for your computer shouldn't hurt.

[adamw]

Bluetooth ought to work, yes. Google is very definitely your friend when it comes to this. Google for any given combination of GPRS, bluetooth, razr, Mandriva and Mandrake and you'll probably come up with some useful pages. I have lodged a feature request for drakconnect to do gprs-over-bluetooth in 2006, but I don't know if this will happen. Currently, doing such connections basically involves a lot of reading and hacking obscure shell scripts, which is a pity, but it _does_ work, once you've done your reading.

[Havin_it]

OK, I bit the bullet and got a dongle, and you might just be right about it being easier than the cable. I've had *some* progress, but will need to swot up on the ways of Bluetooth. So far, I've installed KDEBluetooth and KMobiletools, but neither is working smoothly.

 

KDEBluetooth pops up an error-box on boot (repeated about nine times!) and KMobiletools won't do much because it expects the bluetooth device to be at /dev/rfcomm0, except this doesn't exist on my system. The rfcomm command-line tools don't return any results either, so it seems something's amiss there.

On the plus side, when I make the phone discoverable, I can see services available in KDEBluetooth, so at least I know the link can exist, I just can't seem to make it permanent.

[Havin_it]

A rather disturbing discovery: I have services missing! Namely, sdpd (service discovery protocol daemon) and hcid (not sure about this one, but should have it apparently).

 

Perhaps this is why the rfcomm device is not appearing? How can I install these services?

[Havin_it]

nice, I have got teh h00kup!

 

First, I actually had to turn on many more services than I had. the bluetooth service entry actually covers sdpd and hcid apparently, but there were one or two others.

 

dund: Dial-up networking (for GPRS hookup, hopefully)

hidd: human interface device (not likely to use this, but testing)

pand: personal area networking (ditto - no other BT devices!)

 

I also had to run the following command to create the /dev/rfcomm0 device

 

rfcomm bind 0 [phone MAC address] 1

 

Ran Kmobiletools and am now able to send texts and browse/sync addressbook. Hurrah!

 

HOWEVER: I'm not done yet. I'm a tiny bit scared of the next step (GPRS) for two main reasons:

 

- dund service doesn't seem to start on demand;

- When I ran sdptool search --bdaddr [MAC address] DUN, this line of output:

 

Service Provider: /a/mobile/system/cl.gif

 

[i know from my hacking adventures with this phone, that cl.gif is the image displayed on the flip when it's open. Now how does that 'provide' anything?]

 

So I'll come back to this as the GPRS mission progresses. Any more useful links always appreciated!

[Havin_it]

So far things went a bit better than I expected. I've got KPPP installed and configured (quite a relief as this app. gave me hell in the past). I got as far as querying the modem, all of which seems to go okay, but upon connecting it always craps out and kills pppd in the process.

 

Since we're up to this point, it seems appropriate to continue with a new topic in Networking. Thanks all for the input thus far.