My experience syncing my Treo 700p with J-Pilot over Bluetooth

I have a Palm Treo 700p with Sprint PCS service. I have had two other palms before: a Palm VX and a Zire 71. Both of these, and for a while the Treo, I synced with J-Pilot using cables. The VX used a serial cable, the Zire and the Treo a USB cable.

However, as others have reported, the Treo does strange things with creating USB tty ports before the sync starts. This interacts poorly with J-Pilot, which means it's spotty as to whether the sync will work right or not.

Add to that that I wanted to play around with bluetooth, and I decided to have a go.

Hardware

I am using a nice machine built around an ASUS M2NPV-VM motherboard. I bought a cheapo bluetooth dongle, which shows up on my system as:

Cambridge Silicon Radio, Ltd Bluetooth Dongle (HCI mode)

Software

joehill:/var/log# uname -a
Linux joehill 2.6.18 #2 SMP Sat Jan 27 23:18:41 EST 2007 i686 GNU/Linux
joehill:/var/log# cat /etc/debian_version 
lenny/sid

ii  bluetooth                            3.7-1                                Bluetooth stack utilities
ii  bluez-utils                          3.7-1                                Bluetooth tools and daemons
ii  libbluetooth2                        3.11-1                               Library to use the BlueZ Linux Bluetooth stack

Setup on the PC

/etc/default/bluetooth

...
BLUETOOTH_ENABLED=1
...
DUND_ENABLED=1
...
DUND_OPTIONS="--listen --persist --msdun call treo"

/etc/bluetooth/hcid.conf

...
security auto;
...
passkey "xxxx"; #replace xxxx with your preferred pass key
...
name "foo"; #replace foo with you preferred name
        # Inquiry and Page scan
        pscan enable;
        iscan enable;

        # Default link mode
        #   none   - no specific policy 
        #   accept - always accept incoming connections
        #   master - become master on incoming connections,
        #            deny role switch on outgoing connections
        lm accept,master;

        # Default link policy
        #   none    - no specific policy
        #   rswitch - allow role switch
        #   hold    - allow hold mode
        #   sniff   - allow sniff mode
        #   park    - allow park mode
        lp rswitch,hold,sniff,park;
...

/etc/ppp/peers/treo

115200
192.168.101.1:192.168.101.2
local
ms-dns 127.0.0.1
noauth
debug

Setup on the Treo

This was harder. I found this page particularly helpful, though.

System->Prefs->Connection->New...
Choose a name for the connection. Select "PC" for the Connect to: box, and "Bluetooth" for the Via:. Tap to find the PC you're looking for. Assuming you find it, select it and make it a "trusted device." If you don't find it, see the links below on diagnosing bluetooth problems.
System->HotSync
Click the "Modem" side of the selection bar above the hotsync logo. Tap at the top of the screen for the menu, and select Modem Sync Prefs. Click Network, then OK.
Under the hotsync logo you should see the name of the connection you created before. If so, you're all set. You can test your connection by issuing this command from your command line:
```
 pilot-xfer -p net: -l 
```
and tapping the hotsync logo. If all works well, you should have a list of names spit out on your screen.

Links

Some places that I found helpful:

Andrew J. Perrin

Last modified: Fri Jan 23 15:01:13 EST 2004