Sony Ericsson M600i88, Symbian, Ubuntu 8.04 and vodafone Bluetooth UMTS

I snatched a little Usb bluetooth thingy yesterday and was quite astonished to find so very little How-Tos on the net for making it all work nicely together.
See how it finally did.

I aimed to install as little additional software as possible and try to have umts connectivity integrated fine into the basic network manager. Actually, I managed to get it all up and running without installing any additional packet.
The first hurdle was none at all: Ubuntu 8.04 discovered the bluetooth adaptor without a hassle. The bluetooth applet instantly appeared in my main panel.
Now you should check that your designated phone is visible to other bluetooth devices. You'll turn that off again when you are finished setting everything up.

Matchmaking your devices

With the applet functions you can now initiate the bonding process between your phone and computer. Make them permanent friends.

hcitool

Now you need to configure a device on your computer, which is provided as a service by your phone. Scanning a bluetooth device needs at first the specific MAC adress of that device. You'll find out that adress with the hcitool command.
With this MAC adress you can now browse the services, your phone provides. Each service is provided on a specific channel - that's what we need to find out. You use the sdptool, to browse the services provided by your phone.

sdptool

The service, we're interested in, is called Dial up networking. Remember the channel number, you'll need that to permanently configure a pseudo serial device on your computer that really is a service provided by the phone.
The dial-up service even emulates a modem with all these ancient "AT" attention command codes. Last time I used these (together with ppp) was more than 10 years ago!

/etc/bluetooth/rfcomm.conf

Now sudo vi the configuration file for rfcomm devices. Mac adress and channel should be set appropriately to your device.
After restarting your bluetooth services with /etc/init.d/bluetooth stop and /etc/init.d/bluetooth start, you'll see a new device /dev/rfcomm0.
This device behaves like a serial interface and is a direct connection to the modem command emulator in your phone.

Network admin

With a new modem-like device, we can enter the network admin applet to configure the actual internet connection.
Just remember the new device /dev/rfcomm0, you need that now. Take a look at the screenshots.
Actually, I suppose, you may use whatever you like as username or password.

Try to connect

You should now have a new submenu in your network-admin applet, to start and end the dial-up connection. Before you give it your first try, open up a terminal window and tail -f /var/log/messages to watch the diagnostic output.
That's when I ran into a slight glitch - hopefully you won't.

ppp ago

See, here's where I got a flashback again. 10 years ago, twiddling with ppp options was a standard skill - now it's more of a forgotten art. In /etc/ppp/options you find all configuration options for the ppp daemon, that's the driver that translates the characters transmitted through your phone into ip packets and provides your system with a network device (ppp0). Ppp is kind of a tricky beast.
I fixed the glitch by changing a few of the options in the aforementioned configuration file.
In my case, the options local (as opposed to modem) and silent did the trick. To edit the file, sudo vi it.
Here's a filtered output of only the active options I have in my configuration file. You may use these lines (without the grep command line of course) as a very simple options-file.

ska@pagan:/etc/ppp$ grep -v "^#" options | grep -v "^$"
asyncmap 0
noauth
crtscts
local
lock
silent
debug
proxyarp
lcp-echo-interval 30
lcp-echo-failure 4
noipx

After these changes, everything went a-ok.