Dec 6
HowTo: Pair your Bluetooth mobile phone with Ubuntu Intrepid for file transfers etc.
Posted on Saturday, December 6, 2008 in Tutorials
While connecting a Bluetooth mobile phone to Ubuntu was not terribly difficult, Ubuntu Intrepid brings with it a new Wizard for connecting all manner of Bluetooth devices without the user having to touch the command line at all.
So, to that end, here is an update to my previous HowTo for connecting a Bluetooth mobile phone to Ubuntu Gusty or Ubuntu Hardy.
EDIT August 2009: If you are wanting to connect your phone using Ubuntu Jaunty or later, you should follow these updated instructions instead of this article.
Pre-requisites:
- Bluetooth-enabled mobile phone (I’m using a Nokia N95 in this guide).
- USB Bluetooth adapter or PC with built-in Bluetooth such as a modern-day notebook. Your adapter must be Bluetooth 1.2 compliant or higher.
- A PC with Ubuntu Linux 8.10 Intrepid Ibex installed.
Difficulty level: Mind-bogglingly easy. Point and click, essentially!
- First, plug in your USB Bluetooth adapter or enable it on your notebook. Ubuntu should recognise it immediately with no need for additional drivers. You can optionally confirm that by jumping into a terminal as issuing the lsusb command to list your USB devices:
$ lsusb | grep tooth Bus 001 Device 005: ID 1310:0001 Roper Class 1 Bluetooth Dongle $ - You’ll be happy to know that Ubuntu comes pre-installed with everything you need to get Bluetooth running, and if the driver is loaded successfully, you will see a Bluetooth icon appear in your system tray, awaiting your bidding.
. - Do a single left-mouse click on the Bluetooth icon and a menu appears showing “Setup new device…”.
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- Once you choose the menu option, the Bluetooth Device Wizard will appear.
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- Click Forward and your system will begin scanning for local Bluetooth devices. Whatever it finds will be shown in the list (note that this may take a few seconds to update). One of them should be your Bluetooth-enabled mobile phone (which will initially appears as its MAC address, but then after a few seconds will change to the name assigned to that device). If you cannot see your phone after a few seconds, make sure that Bluetooth is enabled on your handset and try again from Step 3.
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- Select your phone and his Forward. Ubuntu will then generate a random PIN number and commence a pairing request with your phone. Your phone handset, meantime, should immediately prompt you to enter the randomly-generated PIN number.
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- Once you have entered the PIN code on your phone, Ubuntu will complete the pairing request and that’s it – pairing done!
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- Now we can start doing things, such as file transfers. Go back to the Bluetooth icon in your System Tray and this time do a single right-mouse click on it. A new menu appears. Go to “Browse files on device…”.
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. - You will be asked which of your paired Bluetooth devices you wish to browse. Choose your phone from the list and click the “Connect” button.
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- After a brief delay, a Nautilus window should pop up showing your phone’s “drives”. In the case of my Nokia N95, the phone’s internal memory is presented a Windows-esque C: drive and the memory card is presented as E: drive. What appears here is ultimately down to how your phone manufacturer has implemented the filesystem.
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. - At this time, an icon for your phone will also be added to your desktop (I use a custom icon on mine):
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. - Browse and copy files as normal. When you are done, you should disconnect your phone by unmounting it with the Unmount or Eject right-mouse menu options (or the Eject icon next to your phone’s name in the Bookmark list).
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. - And that’s it! Pat yourself on the back. Job done.
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[...] Ubuntu Linux (this guide was built using Gutsy Gibbon 7.10 but also works for Hardy Heron 8.04). NOTE: If you are using Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex or later, you should use this guide instead. [...]
I have tried the above steps, however 2 problems occur, 1 the bluetooth icon does not seem to show up in the task bar (not a big issue i get to it via system->preference->bluetooth
The other problem is that I am unable to pair with my nokia 6263 or my nokia n91/n95/n96.
It comes up failed in both the gui that you have shown above, and if i go the other way around trying to connect via the symbian os
For the missing Bluetooth icon in the notification area, in the Bluetooth preferences, under the General tab, make sure that “Only display when adapter present” or “Always display icon” is selected.
Is Bluetooth fully activated on your phone? You may need to switch both Ubuntu and your phone to be “always visible”.
I immediately get “Pairing with *** failed” with two different phones (Nokia 6555 and Samsung SGH-A707). Bluetooth is enabled and visibility set to always on the phones and in System-Preferences->Bluetooth.
Is there a log file or something which gives details about why the pairing failed?
I searched /var/log and found nothing…
Hi Jim,
Bluetooth messages are written to the system log in /var/log/syslog so go see what it’s reporting in there. Grep anything reported by “bluetoothd”.
If pairing continues to fail, I’d suggest deleting everything inside /var/lib/bluetooth/ (which contains a directory named after the MAC address of your Bluetooth adapter which in turn contains info about all your paired devices), restart your system and try re-pairing your devices again to recreate all that data you just deleted.
I am trying out Ubuntu 8.1 to see if I want to switch (from Vista). I cannot pair my phone to my Dell using dongle (no internal BlueTooth), the Wizard & device search does not do anything. I tried to enter phone address by hand, no good. Is that because I am running Live CD?
Thanks, Petr
I am not getting the bluetooth icon as well and i have the option “always visible” selected
** excuse me “always display icon” is selected.
Petr and Billy: You can definitely use the LiveCD. It looks to me that your Bluetooth dongle might not be supported. There are a lot of cheap dongles out there that only support Bluetooth 1.1 and Ubuntu requires your adapter to have Host Controller Interface (HCI) support, which is typically any Bluetooth 1.2 device or higher.
You can see if your Bluetooth adapter is being recognised by typing in:
dmesg | grep Bluetooth
…and looking at the output to see if the Bluetooth stack is being initialised (note the capital “B” in “Bluetooth” in that command). If you don’t see some lines similar to the following:
[ 13.396166] Bluetooth: Core ver 2.13
[ 13.420159] Bluetooth: HCI device and connection manager initialized
[ 13.430622] Bluetooth: HCI socket layer initialized
[ 13.587944] Bluetooth: Generic Bluetooth USB driver ver 0.3
…then your Bluetooth adapter is not recognised by Ubuntu, because if it were, the Bluetooth icon would appear straight away in the system tray.
Check the specifications of your Bluetooth adapter.
the lines i get are identical to those in your example
**after doing ‘research’ i have found others with the same laptop as me have had no problems at all.
fix:
info here:https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/289836
add “deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/blueman/ubuntu intrepid main” to sources list
get key: “sudo apt-key adv –recv-keys –keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com 6B15AB91951DC1E2″
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install blueman
What this DOES is uninstalles bluez4 and installs bluez3. Bluez4 is buggy and you need bluez3.
after all that go into your menu and click on BLUETOOTH MANAGER
hope this helps
Billy, did that work for you? If it did, great, but I have never had any such issues, so clearly there is something different about your Bluetooth adapter. Please check that it is Bluetooth 1.2 compliant or higher.
I’ve also just upgraded to Jaunty (last night in fact) and my Bluetooth stack is working quite nicely at the moment, icon and all.
Thanks HyRax for the info. I will get a different dongle and give it another try
8.10 and 9.04 can’t (bond)pairing my mobile phone blueman 1.0 can’t help me
[...] 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 [...]