We will try to get a GPRS internet connection using Linux-based phones as modems and route the connection to Mac OS X via Bluetooth. This guide is for Mac OS X, the US Cingular GPRS service only (other providers might work out of the box with the phone, others might not at all — you never know with GPRS) and any of the Linux-based Motorola smartphones like the A760, A780, E680/i etc (they are all identical regarding their ‘modem’ functionality).Setup
1. Download this modem script and place it on your /Library/Modem Scripts/ folder on your OSX. This script is ready to be used as a 57600 kbps modem but you can edit it and make it faster if you think your phone’s modem-like functionality is fast enough (e.g. 115200). The script is also ready to be used on the Cingular GPRS network, so if you want to use another GPRS provider, you must change the “wap.cingular” words (that’s the APN) in the modem script you just downloaded to the one that’s appropriate for your service:
write “AT+CGDCONT=1,\34IP\34,\34wap.cingular\34,,0,0\13”
and you might also have to change this text too:
write “ATD*99***1#\13”
Cingular’s non-subscription GPRS dialing number is *99***1#, but some others use *99#, so you will have to google it to find the correct one for your provider. Usually though, it is *99***1# for most.
The above generic script also worked for my husband’s Sony Ericsson K700i, however, if it doesn’t work for you, please try this one. Some people have had success with this script, even if they are not using SprintPCS (that was originally written for).
2. Turn on Bluetooth on your Mac. Turn on both GPRS and Bluetooth on your phone (from the “Device Status” window that comes up when you click on the battery indicator). Then, go to the Apps/Tools/Modem application on your phone and change the modem option from “USB Cable” to “Bluetooth”. Stay on that screen (don’t navigate elsewhere on your phone from now on).
3. On your Mac, open the “Bluetooth Setup Assistant”. Just 1 second before you press “Continue” on that screen, click on the “Find Me” button on your phone. Then, press “Continue” and then “Mobile Phone” on your Mac and follow up the wizard to setup the Address Book and “phone support” and pair the two devices. iSync is not supported by these Linux phones. When the Mac will ask you about the GPRS/phone-support fields, enter phone number *99***1#, user name [email protected] and password CINGULAR1 (yes, they are case sensitive). Change accordingly if your GPRS provider is not Cingular.
4. Open your Mac’s Preferences/Network and voila, the settings you entered earlier are now under the “Bluetooth” option from the drop-down menu. Under the PPP tab, enter a name for the connection (e.g. Cingular, or T-Mobile or whatever else you like). Click on “PPP options” and uncheck “Send PPP echo Packets”. If later you find that you can connect but no data is flowing through, also uncheck the “Use TCP header compression” option. Leave the TPC/IP and Proxies tabs unaltered. On the “Bluetooth Modem” tab uncheck both “Enable error correction and compression in modem” and “Wait for dial tone before dialing”. From the “Modem” drop down menu navigate in it and find the “linux-smartphone” option and select it. When done with all this, click “Apply Now”.
5. Now, this is the part that didn’t work and drove me crazy (direct GPRS was working, but via the Mac and Bluetooth didn’t). Many thanks to Clifford Kite for finding this out through some trial and error. For these specific Linux smartphones (other phones work automatically) and when used via the Mac for Cingular *in particular*, you must create a ppp ‘options’ file using the TextEditor. In it type exactly this dummy remote IP address:
:192.168.0.254
and then save the file on your ~ home folder (*make absolutely sure* that your file is not renamed from TextEditor to ‘options.txt’, but plain ‘options’ — TextEditor is known to do that, you must do a ‘Get Info’ on the file to be sure). Then, open a terminal and move the file to its correct location:
sudo mv options /etc/ppp/options
(from now on you can use the ‘nano’ terminal-based text editor if you need to edit it again by invoking this: sudo nano /etc/ppp/options). If you are not using Cingular with a Linux phone via the Mac, you might never need to create this ‘options’ file. Also, if later you find some LCP/IPCP errors on your logs and they are failing your connection, try adding this line above the dummy remote IP address on your ‘options’ file: novj
6. Open the ‘Internet Connect’ application on your Mac, and click the plain Bluetooth connection icon. Go to your phone, and click again “Find Me”. Immediately after that, click “Connect” on your Mac and “ok” on your phone’s popup window. A few seconds later you should be connected on Cingular’s GPRS and start paying $1 per 100 KBs! >;)
Troubleshooting
Logs are your friends. If you can’t connect, go to the Mac’s ‘Bluetooth Network Preferences’, click on the “PPP options” and then click on the “Verbose logging”. Then open the “Console” application from /Applications/Utilities/ and find the main ppp log. Assuming you have done the pairing and filled the login/passwords correctly for your provider, leave a comment below with the relevant verbose ppp log and we will have a look at it.
Another interesting application is the “Bluetooth Serial Utility” that Apple removed from OSX Tiger (bad decision). Through it you can create new GPRS connections if you have more than one phones or providers (select the options: DUN/Dial-Up service from your second phone, Outgoing, Modem and ‘show on network preferences’ on the “create new” dialog and give that connection a name). You might also have to check or uncheck (depending on your provider, I had to uncheck it for Cingular) both the encryption and the authentication bits. Then, you open back the Network preferences in the system preferences of the mac, under “show network status” select “network port configurations” and then check the checkbox of the newly created port. Click Apply, click its name to go to its network preferences and then follow the steps from No4 above, onwards (you will have to enter manually the number, login and password).
Links
If your Mac doesn’t have Bluetooth, you might need to use the USB cable instead. Instructions here (free reg. req.).
Good luck!
Update: Reader Robert Hewitt has sent us information how to connect the Motorola EZX phones with Vodafone UK. Email him for more details.
The connect scripts need to have the following lines edited:
for phones on a contract
write “AT+CGDCONT=1,\34IP\34,\34internet\34,,0,0\13”
for phones on pay as you go
write “AT+CGDCONT=1,\34IP\34,\34pp.vodafone.co.uk\34,,0,0\13”
The number to dial is *99#
Username: web
Password: web
I wanted to buy an A780 but I was conflicted because of two things
1. Greek Compatibility (Greek contacts in addressbook, calendar, webpages, email)
2. iSync with the mac
Could you check these two things out ?
what has your experience been ?
1. There is no greek support in the Motorola Linux smartphones (at least the unlocked ones that one could find in the bazaar
. There is only Chinese and English support. These smartphone’s market is primarily for China and Singapore in fact, not even USA.
2. No, the full range of iSync does not work, as I already mentioned in the article. But Address Book syncing and modem-functionality does.
>what has your experience been ?
Did you not read my review of the E680i the other day? (the A780 and E680i software side is almost identical). I link it above!
The last 5 days have been a haze :p
The article starts off poorly and you don’t really know what it is about till the last sentence of the 1st paragraph. Ok, a phone geek can make an educated guess and probably be right but c’mon.
Please this is not a troll. I am actually a fan of Eugenia’s articles.
Very well, I exchanged the order of the two sentences.
You know you are awesome right. Reads beautifully now. Thanks.
I dont have any special service, just plain Sprint Vision. The dialup networking and bluetooth on it works great with my 12″ powerbook. Way faster than my dialup, way slower than my cable.
Nice subject.Can we have a bluesnarfing article next? 🙂
Any way to browse with your mobile using your Mac’s Internet connection through Bluetooth?
The Sharing system preferences seem to have a “share internet connection through Bluetooth, but I cannot sort out how to use it with my N-Gage, or if it is supposed to do that at all…
Your question is a very valid one. There are a lot of PDA users who want to get bluetooth internet connection via their Mac, but Apple does NOT provide this feature. Apple provides the ability to share a bluetooth connection to another network interface (e.g. WiFi), but not from another network interface *to* Bluetooth device. So, don’t waste any time trying to make this work. This is why I even wrote this a while back: http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=10923
So, no, you can’t share a network connection to Bluetooth device with Tiger. You could do it with Panther with some command line work, but it seems that no one has figured it out for Tiger yet.
But even if this was supported, the Linux motorola phones don’t support that. They only support accepting a network connection either via Edge, GPRS or CSD. No Bluetooth or WiFi, even if they had the hardware in place. They don’t support it in the software level.
Thanks for the reply.
Can you expand then, please, what is Bluetooth supposed to do in the Sharing system preferences? I see that you already mentioned that one could “share a bluetooth connection to another network interface (e.g. WiFi), but not from another network interface *to* Bluetooth device”. But I still cannot make out what that means exactly, or what this literal (transl. from Spanish) setting means: “Share connection from Bluetooth with computers that use Ethernet/Firewire/Airport”.
What would that accomplish? What would you use that with, for instance? (the Help System is quite lacking on that)
I see that you already mentioned that one could “share a bluetooth connection to another network interface (e.g. WiFi), but not from another network interface *to* Bluetooth device”. But I still cannot make out what that means exactly
I believe she means that, if you had a connection established over bluetooth (like the one described in the article, using a cellphone as a modem), you could then allow other computers on your local network to use that connection through NAT, wireless, or some other connection sharing scheme. But, if you already have a connection setup on the Mac (e.g., cable/dsl) and you want to allow other computers/devices to access that connection via bluetooth, it won’t work.
It should be possible although it’ll be a bit of hardwork.
Once you have some sort of ethernet forwarding over BT from the freeBSD box (Bluetooth PAN Protocol implementation as an example). You’ll need a client side bluetooth application running on the Linux phone, this would have to route the ethernet packets via the phone’s built in subsystem.
I’m not huge on the linux phones, would you need to recompile the kernel to do this ? Surely there could be some way to do it without the re-compliation ?
but what about connecting your Linux Smartphone… to Linux?!
I am currently connected from my Mac powerbook G4 via bluetooth to my Nokia 6680 which then connects via 3G to the internet. It works absolutely perfectly without any hassles.
anyone?
There is a community of linux hackers working on extending the functionality of these Motorola linux phones (E680/E680I/A780) at :
http://www.motorolafans.com/
Being based on QT and Linux, quite a few things have been hacked into the phone:
1) OPIE running alongside Motorola’s phone application
2) BlueZ with PAND support
3) Adding unofficial localizations to the phone
4) Ability to act as a NAT gateway to Windows/Linux machines
Meanwhile work is underway on:
1) Bluetooth HID support
2) USB Host support (it currently operates only as a client)
I’m sure I’ve missed out quite a few. But what I can say is, this phone is definitely a good buy, providing me with hours of hacking pleasure.