Connecting

Until someone comes along to try some alternative access methods, I can only talk about my experiences with bluetooth.

Setting up bluetooth was non-trivial, although the main problems I had were finding appropriate documentation which I could make sense of as a beginner to the area. Sadly I've forgotten what I did, so I won't be much use if you can't do this yourself. I will try and re-create my steps and document them at some time

I have been running the 2.6 kernels since mid-test series which have BlueZ included, so I use that. I understand that this has been included since the early 2.4 kernels.

Gentoo rather helpfully includes the majority of the needed user-space tools in bluez-utils. The /etc/init.d/bluetooth script makes use of hcid, spdp and hciattach which get things going.

I paired my phone to the computer and use rfcomm to set up the serial link to my phone using the command:
  rfcomm connect /dev/bluetooth/rfcomm/0 00:00:eb:97:d4:38

The default parameters seem to work just fine. Once this step is complete and you have the message:
  Connected /dev/bluetooth/rfcomm/0 to 00:00:EB:97:D4:38 on channel 1
  Press CTRL-C for hangup

You should be up and running. You can get the ID string from your phone under the Bluetooth menu.

As of version 0.0.5, the rfcomm program is no longer needed to establish the connection. You can specify e.g.
  x70talk -b 00:00:eb:97:d4:38 ...
instead and x70talk will establish it's own connection.

As of version 0.1.0, the -b option is deprecated; you can use the -d option instead, the program detects the bluetooth address.