What cool stuff can you do with Ubuntu and a Bluetooth phone?

[Bou]

I have never been a heavy bluetooth user, in spite of having a bluetooth enabled phoned. Now I have been given a bluetooth adapter for my laptop and would like to impress my girlfriend so... what exactly can you do with Ubuntu and a bluetooth enabled phone?

I know you can browse the phone's contents -which is pretty cool- and I've read you can use it as a remote, but I haven't been able to make that work. Any cool stuff YOU got working? Anything in the repos?

[FuturePilot]

I'm able to browser my phone through Nautilus with gnome-vfs-obexftp. I would recommend installing Blueman (http://blueman.tuxfamily.org/). It's an awesome GTK Bluetooth manager. There's a repo on that page.
As for a remote this is how I got it working.

gksudo gedit /etc/init.d/bluetooth
Change HIDD_ENABLED=0 to =1
Restart the Bluetooth services

sudo /etc/init.d/bluetooth restart
Now make sure your phone has Bluetooth activated and is discoverable. Then scan for your phone

hcitool scan
You should get a MAC address. Something like
00:11:22:AA:BB:CC PhoneName
Now take the MAC address that you got from above and use it to connect

sudo hidd --connect 00:11:22:AA:BB:CC
Now you should be able to control the mouse from your phone. I'm not sure if your phone has a built in bluetooth remote so you'll have to see how that is done.

[Bou]

I would recommend installing Blueman (http://blueman.tuxfamily.org/)

I noticed it allows you to "bond" your phone to the computer. What's that for?

[King_Critter]

http://getdeb.net/app.php?name=BlueProximity

Blue Proximity. From the above page:


This software helps you add a little more security to your desktop. It does so by detecting one of your bluetooth devices, most likely your mobile phone, and keeping track of its distance. If you move away from your computer and the distance is above a certain level (no measurement in meters is possible) for a given time, it automatically locks your desktop (or starts any other shell command you want).

[rowanparker]

Can bluetooth devices measure distance?
Or does it do it on signal strength or something?

Edit: I see, you just get a number, it must be signal strength.
BlueProximity is really useful. Although can be annoying if you forget, lol.

[FuturePilot]

I noticed it allows you to "bond" your phone to the computer. What's that for?

In order to communicate between the phone and the computer you need to bond (sometimes called pairing) the phone to the computer. Basically all it is is you're telling the computer you trust this bluetooth device and you will allow it access to the computer. And vice versa.

[sumguy231]

If you're a Kubuntu user you can use KBlueLock, part of KBluetooth, which is the same thing but for KDE.

[Spike-X]

Take over the world, probably!

http://my.opera.com/kaylinq/homes/blog/pinkybrain.jpg