HowTo: Pair your Bluetooth mobile phone with Ubuntu Jaunty for file transfers etc.

by HyRax August 16, 2009

Following up my previous article of how to pair your Bluetooth mobile phone with Ubuntu Intrepid, I present this updated article for pairing your mobile phone using the updated version of the Bluez Bluetooth stack and the newer and better Blueman applet for Jaunty which greatly simplifies the process of pairing Bluetooth devices and transferring files to your mobile phone.

First up, you need to follow the first 15 steps of my guide on how to seutp a Nokia N95 mobile phone as a Mobile Broadband Device because we need to update the version of the Bluez Bluetooth stack and pair your mobile phone. Once you get to step 15 where it asks about connecting the phone as a dial-up networking device, you can either choose to continue setting that up all the way through to Step 22 (after all, you might find DUN to be of genuine use to you if you’re a Mobile Internet kind of guy), or choose “Don’t connect” instead and just finish at Step 15 and continue on with this article.

Once you’re Bluetooth stack is updated and your mobile phone is paired, transfrerring files is simplicity itself:

Do a left-mouse click on the Bluetooth icon in your system tray. The Bluetooth Devices window will appear showing you your available or previously paired devices. Your mobile phone will be one of them.

Do a right-mouse click on your mobile phone and choose “Browse” from the menu that appears (or select the mobile phone with the left-mouse button and then click on the “Browse” button in the toolbar).

NOTE: If you get a “Could not display ‘obex://[xxxxxxx]/’.” error when trying to browse, it means that the Bluetooth connection has not re-established itself between your PC and your phone after a previous pairing (ie: “Host is down”. To fix this, click on the “Search” button in the toolbar which will “awaken” your phone’s Bluetooth awareness and then choose “Browse device” again. You should also set your PC and phone to be “trusted” or “authorised” on both sides to prevent timeouts caused by either end asking you for permission to establish the connection.

If your PC is setup as being “trusted” or “authorised” on your phone, within a second or so a Nautilus window should appear showing you the content of your mobile phone, or in the case of my Nokia N95, two Windows-like folders named “C:” and “E:” which represent the phone’s internal memory and my 8GB SD card in the phone. You can browse them like any ordinary folders including copying and pasting files. An icon for the phone will also appear on the desktop (I’m using a custom icon here).

When you have finished dealing with the files on your phone, you need to cleanly disconnect the phone and end the Bluetooth session. You can do this one of two ways. Either click on the “Eject” triangle icon next to your phone’s name in the Places list of the Nautilus window, or in the Bluetooth Devices window, do a right-mouse click and choose “Disconnect Device” from the menu.