Bluetooth Phones and Debian: A simple, Utilitarian Approach.
My approach to using bluetooth apps in Debian really came from a desire to transfer media Pc –>Phone. To be clear here, I really didn’t have much need for Phone–>PC transfers. That being said, here’s what I’ve done.
I installed the Debian Package openobex-apps. Contained in the app is a tool called obexftp. After discovering my phone’s MAC for the bluetooth interface, I saved it to an environment variable ( ie. $MYPHONE) and created the following script.
#!/bin/bash
for arg
do
obexftp -b $MYPHONE -p "$arg"
done
Since I use Gnome, I simply put this in my ~/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts directory. Since then, I’ve been able to select multiple files via the mouse and send them to my phone (multiselect capable).
I don’t contest the opinion that this is pretty limited and the script could probably be reworked so that it doesn’t make separate calls to obexftp for each argument. However, it works and I’ve sent over 14 items at a time to my phone (Sony Z-520a) from my PC no problem using the above script. It was really just a quick solution to my need to send media to my phone.
There are undoubtedly other packages available. I just became aware of the fact that Ed Dumbill’s bluez-gnome package has made it into Debian Testing. This is a package that has point and click functionality as well as a panel applet to monitor incoming calls and text messages. I had trouble getting this to install properly… it couldn’t copy a file to /etc/xdg/autostart.
