I literally mean that.

The idea popped in my head a few days ago and i thought it would be quite interesting to see how doable it was.

The hardware used is a Dikom (Broadcom) Usb bluetooth dongle, a Nokia E61i ( Symbian S60 3rd ) and tested on a Dell Inspiron C521 and a PackardBell Easynote R ( both on Hardy Heron 8.04).
It is also assumed that the dongle is connected and the computer can use bluetooth normally.

So looking around for projects that had already done this, i came across three main ones.

Bluepad ( which i successfully installed on both systems, but on the Dell it always failed to find devices to connect and on the Easynote it always failed to connect to the devices found. Troubleshooting the app goes beyond the scope of this material).

Amora (installed correctly on the phone, altogether with the required python shell, and properly compiled on the system but the app on the phone never replied to the BT connections from the server).

Last but not least anyRemote – worked like a charm.
And that’s the one i picked.

The applications to install can be downloaded from the Sourceforge page of the project.
There is a .jar and .jad version to be installed on the phone (either sent by BT or cable ).
A server application, of which you can download the source and compile it or the premade deb.
If you need the 64bit version ( like me in both cases ), here’s that here’s that.

You can get extra add-ons such as a Gnome or KDE front-end and so on.

The Gnome interface ( ganyremote, creative , i know), is quite intuitive once you fire it up.
The source comes with a set of configurations that you can feed to the app.
If you just want to use the binary from command line the syntax is the following:

anyremote -f /path_to_config.cfg

The computer is not waiting for connections to which it will serve an interface based on the config file given to anyremote.

Launch the application on the phone. You can search for new BT devices until you find the computer, connect if/when found.
You can manually insert the required bluetooth address that you want the phone to connect to:

btspp://XXXXXXXXXXXX:19

where the XXXXXXXXXXXX is the Bt address of the dongle, which can be found with

hcitool dev

or

socket://ip_address:port

if your phone supports wifi. I did not test that. Maybe in the next few days.
That’s all foks.

For a little bit i had been contemplating implementing a solution to synchronize the data on my NokiaE61i (being contacts, calendars and such) with the Lightning calendar on Thunderbird.

After bashing my head for a few days trying to get blueZync to run correctly and realizing that ScheduleWorld/GoogleCalendar/GnomeCalendar, it’s a bit of a long loop for my private data, made my mind to make a switch i had been thinking of. Evolution.
And also because the latest versions of Thunderbird , which i had carried on using from the Windows days, ate RAM like it had to.

Evolution has a relatively intuitive interface for both Thunderbird, and even Outlook users.
A really nice calendar and a good contact manager. It’s just good software. Period.

It comes preinstalled in the standard distribution of Ubuntu so the only thing to do was set my accounts up on it. The explanation of that goes beyond the scope of this post.

The crucial piece of software needed for this is Multisync.
So add the repos in the source list /etc/apt/sources.lst :

deb http://opensync.gforge.punktart.de/repo/opensync-0.21/ feisty main
deb-src http://opensync.gforge.punktart.de/repo/opensync-0.21/ feisty main

I’m currently doing this on Hardy, but this seems to be the latest available, and it works fine actually.
For the repository key , proceed as following:

gpg --keyserver hkp://subkeys.pgp.net/ --recv-keys CB210090B029CB84
gpg --export CB210090B029CB84 | sudo apt-key add -

Finally, install the required software:

sudo aptitude install libopensync-plugin-* libopensync0 opensyncutils msynctool mulstisync-qad bluez-passkey-gnome bluez-gnome

Now msynctool needs some configuration:

msynctool --addgroup e61i
msynctool --addmember e61i evo2-sync
msynctool --addmember e61i syncml-obex-client

Use hcitool to find the MAC address of the bluetooth device of the phone itself.
Here’s mine.


hcitool scan
Scanning ...
00:17:E5:XX:XX:XX Sid's nokia

Now the two installed plugins need some final configuration.

msynctool --configure e61i 1

And this is what the content of that file needs to be:

http://pastebin.com/f3e6e708a

The other plugin:

msynctool --configure e61i 2

in my case has the following configuration:

http://pastebin.com/f7df629f8

At the very end:

msynctool --sync nokia

Or you can user the Multisync-qad application we installed (/usr/bin/multisync0.90).