Thu, 10 Aug 2006
Bluetooth File Transfer
Today I have spent some time trying to upload an image to Pavlína's phone - SonyEricsson T68i. I have succeeded, but it was not straightforward:
The positive side is, that on Fedora Core 5, the bluepin with D-Bus actually works, so it is possible to pair the devices inside the desktop environment, without writing the PIN to a config file. I have then tried gnokii to upload and download files, but without success. Gnokii supports T68i, it can identify it over Bluetooth (via a rfcomm link), but getting the list of files is not supported.
So I have tried OBEX file transfers. After some time I was able
to connect via obex_test, and receive an empty file
telecom/pb/0.vcf (from the examples found in the Web).
However, I still did not know how to send files, and under which names
(to which directories).
The next step was to use obex_push. I have misread the manpage,
and I thought the "channel" parameter is compulsory. But I did not know
the correct channel number. After a while, running obex_push
without any argument helped: it prints that it sends/receives files
on the channel #10. obex_push 10 phone:mac:addr /tmp/file.jpg
then did what I expected.
The phone did receive the image, but refused to display it. After some more googling, I have found the list of T68i supported image formats - the JPEG I sent to the phone was bigger than 640x480 pixels...
I have then moved on to explore the desktop features of Bluetooth.
gnome-bluetooth-manager can discover available devices
(one of my neighbors has a laptop and Nokia 6230i in visible mode ;-),
but did not do anything else, even when choosing "Properties" from the
menu. gnome-obex-send allows to choose the device to which
files are to be sent, but then unsuccessfully attempts to install an icon
and exits. Later I have found, that with
nautilus-sendto-bluetooth it is possible to send files with
Nautilus' right-click menu.
On the other hand, I managed to get the receiving side,
gnome-obex-server, working. It is just necessary to
set up the directory
to which files are to be uploaded.
So I think bluetooth file transfer more-or-less works, but the desktop part still needs to be improved.
4 replies for this story:
Vasek Stodulka wrote: Good backend and no frontend
I must agree. Bluetooth in Linux has a good backend (bluez), but absulutely none usable frontend. And bluez documentation is only FRTS (where "S" means source) or Google.
Vasek Stodulka wrote: s/FRTS/RTFS/
I meaned RTFS, FRTS is nonsence. :)
-- Dan wrote: btfs
btfs should be the right thing for you. http://www.mulliner.org/bluetooth/btfs.php But, I don't test it enough yet.
Yenya wrote: Re: btfs
Well, I am not a big fan of FUSE - for me, obex_push is definitely sufficient. I just wanted to explore the posibilities BT provides in modern desktops (read: for BFUs).