Bluetooth File Transfers in Linux
Exchange data freely between your Bluetooth device and your Linux box.
Getting on the Net [Hack #17] from anywhere your cell phone works is pretty darn cool, but your phone probably has other features. Maybe someone messaged you a photo from their family barbecue that you want to copy over to your laptop. Or maybe you just want to install some applications on your shiny new phone.
The heart of file transfer over Bluetooth
is called the Object
Exchange
, or OBEX, protocol, a binary file
transfer protocol run over not merely Bluetooth, but also Infrared
and even generic TCP/IP. The
OpenOBEX project at
http://openobex.sf.net/ offers
the most ubiquitous open source implementation of the protocol. You
can get packages for libopenobex and
openobex-apps from the sid
distribution, and Red Hat packages for openobex
can be had from the
SourceForge site
or on rpmfind.net. Bluetooth actually supports
two different OBEX profiles for transferring files:
OBEX Push, which is primarily used
for dumping individual files to a Bluetooth device, and OBEX File
Transfer, which supports a richer set of file exchange operations.
Unfortunately,
the present state of the art in Bluetooth file transfer using Linux
is still in considerable flux. The
openobex-apps
package contains an
obex_test
application, which offers one very rudimentary way of sending files to your Bluetooth devices. First, you need to figure out which Bluetooth channel your phone or other device uses ...
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