Bluetooth tethering to IPhone

[Guest]

I have an HP Mini 110 which had Ubuntu 10.04 LTS and I eventually got this to tether to my iPhone so I could work on while on trains.
I am a fan of KDE and decided to upgrade to 11.10 Kubuntu and I have to say that, apart from my current problem, this has worked well.
My problem is that while I can successfully pair with my iPhone, the bluetooth applet (bluedevil, I guess) reports 'No supported services found'.

I have trawled the 'net and I have seen that others see services, including NAP, being reported. What I believe should happen is that when the iPhone is paired, the bluetooth stack should set up a Personal Area Network (PAN) which in turn sets up a bnep0 'wired' interface.
If I pair my phone and do:

sdptool browse [my phone's device id]

I see all the expected services reported including Network Access Point.
If I execute:

sudo pand --connect [my phone's device id]
my iPhone reports its tethered, but there is no bnep0 interface
I get a bnep0 interface up manually doing:

ifconfig bnep0 up

but it is raw and I can't connect to the net through it.

So I think I have proved all the parts work, the question is: what is and where is the config file that provides the missing link? I have read the NetworkManager manual carefully, tried to configure /etc/network/interfaces, NetworkManager.conf and a keyfile in system-connections.

Is there some kind person out there who can point me in the right direction?

[deb8torgg]

Re: Bluetooth tethering to IPhone

Hi,

Yeah I have the same issue in KDE but I have the gnome desktop installed on my laptop as well and using the iPhone tethered via bluetooth works without a drama.

I can get the phone tethered via the cable but not via bluetooth.

Anyone got any ideas ??

[oshunluvr]

Re: Bluetooth tethering to IPhone

No proof of this, but it's possible NetworkManager is your problem. One of it's behaviors is to not correctly assign routing (type route in a terminal when you shoul dbe connected and see if there's a route to your phone).

It has been a bane since it was introduced. The most common recommended fix for network problems for the last three releases of Kubuntu was to remove it and replace it with WICD, If you decided to try this just be sure you remove all it's components.

[deb8torgg]

Re: Bluetooth tethering to IPhone

Thanks for your advice mate. Looks it is now working since I did a big upgrade yesterday and a lot of packages got updates. Probably the NetworkManager was one of them because I am using it right now.

I will look into the WICD also just in case something else goes astray.

Cheers

[de_koraco]

Re: Bluetooth tethering to IPhone

Don't. While WICD is a good tool, Network Manager was written specifically because none of the existing network management tools in Linux do stuff like bluetooth tethering well.

[oshunluvr]

Re: Bluetooth tethering to IPhone

Well, that's interesting because I've never had NetworkManager work at all on the six computers I use Kubuntu on. I couldn't imagine why KNetworkManager was written at all because it's so often the cause of networking problems.

Admittedly, I'm not using 11.10 so maybe there has been improvements in the latest release. I've become so accustomed to removing it right away after an install. I did have it work for a day or two once, but then I started having wireless probems. Lo-and-behold, all I had to do to fix the issues was to remove nertworkmanager and install wicd.

A quick search of the forum will produce dozen's of posts where the only required solution was to remove NetworkManager and use WICD. There was even one who using gnome network manager but kde network manager wouldn't work, but that was a few releases back.

I also don't use Bluetooth tethering, so you are likely right in that regard.

However, bottom line to the OP - since it's working, don't mess with it!

[deb8torgg]

Re: Bluetooth tethering to IPhone

Yeah i think i will just thank my lucky starz it is working

This is the thing with KDE the annoys me. I really want to swap over to it, but I find that its these little things that pop up from time to time that stop me in my tracks.

I will see how this goes and if it goes south, then I will look into WICD.

Cheers all

[Teunis]

Re: Bluetooth tethering to IPhone

I've always been an advocate of WICD for easy wireless access and it still is, I use it on my back-up install for difficult cases.

But the standard networkmanager has really progressed and since 11.04 I can finally use it for my standard install.
The advantage is it supports things like easy tethering to my N900.