Re: Using a mobile phone via Bluetooth

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Sat, 2009-07-04 at 23:55 +0100, Brian Morrison wrote:
> Saw this on the Planet Fedora RSS feed today:
> 
> http://fetzig.org/2009/07/04/tethering-in-fedora-using-your-mobile-phone-with-networkmanager-to-surf-the-web/
> 
> Does this look the sort of thing where a more sane approach could be
> added to NM or udev to cope with a wider range of phones without
> needing to create user rules?

The sane approach is to actually handle bluetooth devices natively in
NM; while the rfcomm thing works, it's certainly not preferred for a
variety of reasons I can explain if you like.  First off is that rfcomm
ports aren't usually dynamic, thus when probed and your phone isn't in
range the probe will fail.  Second is that they don't show up in the NM
API or the menu properly because NM of course doesn't know much about
them because they don't have a proper backing physical device that NM
knows about.  Second, NM can't respond to Bluez events or do anything
intelligent about errors, because NM sees it as just an rfcomm port.

However, there's already bluetooth PAN support in 0.8/master, and DUN
should be coming soon now that all the ModemManager stuff is fixed up
for udev.

http://blogs.gnome.org/dcbw/2009/05/22/a%e2%80%a2b%e2%80%a2c-delicious/

Dan