Very Noisy

I'm Mark Kennedy. I'm part of the furniture at Eurogamer Network Ltd. and I do my best to lead the web development team there.

Pals

Categories

Tethering a Nokia N95 over Bluetooth on Ubuntu 9.10

3 December 2009

N95's and certain other Symbian Nokia phones, implement tethering over bluetooth by offering a Dial Up Networking (DUN) service, i.e. a serial modem over bluetooth. You have to use Hayes modem commands and everything! It's a bit fiddly to set up by hand, and isn't supported (yet) by Gnome's built in bluetooth manager. Fortunately, you can just use the Blueman project's applet instead, though this isn't really documented anywhere.

Do the following. 

sudo apt-get install blueman

Run System -> Preferences -> Bluetooth Manager

Hide the Gnome Bluetooth applet icon (you don't have to, it's just confusing otherwise).

Click the new blue Bluetooth systray icon. You should see your phone, assuming Bluetooth is enabled on the phone, and it's visible. Right click it, and bond it.

Once it's bonded, right click and click Serial Ports -> Dialup service. 3 small bar graphs should appear by the phone entry once connected.

Right click the network-manager applet systray icon, and edit connections. Add a new mobile broadband entry using whatever settings fit your contract.

Click the network-manager applet icon in the systray - you should now be able to connect to this new connection, listed under Mobile Broadband.

Hooray!

Related tags: 9.10, bluetooth, dial up networking, dun, karmic koala, n95, nokia, ubuntu

Comments

1 Tim says...
Hi Mark, and thank you, this was very helpful. One thing I note is that by default, Network Manager will set the serial speed to 115200bps. If you are connected to a UMTS/HSDPA/(faster?) network (commonly referred to as '3G') - you can change this to get better performance. To do this: - Hit ALT+F2 (within Gnome) to bring up the 'Run Application' dialog. - Enter 'gconf-editor' and click 'Run' - Under 'system', expand 'networking' -> 'connections' -> (number of your GSM connection here) and select 'serial'. - In the right-hand pane, doubleclick 'baud' and change its value from the default (115200) to a higher value (I used 921600 - I suspect this needs to be a multiple of 9600?). Hit 'OK'. Close the 'Configuration Editor' window. After doing this, my speed doubled in a test using http://speedtest.net. YMMV, of course.

Posted at 10:44 a.m. on March 23, 2010