nokia E70 + bluetooth + evince

I’m going to the Coreboot symposium 2008 in a few days, where I’ll give a talk titled ‘the view from the FSF’.

I rarely give presentations so I figured I’d better spend some time to configure my laptop (a Dell 1420N) properly. The first step was easy – the Fn-F8 CRT/LCD button just works – it duplicates the LCD output onto the external VGA connector. I had never tried this before

I’m writing my talk in OpenOffice.org Impress, which I then export to PDF and show in Evince‘s excellent presentation mode.

I wanted to be able to control the slideshow via Bluetooth with my phone, a Nokia E70 – and it turns out that’s easy with the excellent anyRemote software. I already had bluetooth working for obex file transfers between the phone and the computer.

While connecting to the phone from the computer worked fine for file transfers, I could not connect from the phone to the computer. The phone gave me the message that the computer was an ‘unsupported device’. Redoing the bluetooth pairing seemed to fix that, I’m not sure yet why.

Making sure that the computer is discoverable can be done with:

hciconfig hci0 piscan

I also had to tell the computer to switch to ‘security mode 3′ and enable authentication and encryption:

hciconfig hci0 auth
hciconfig hci0 encrypt

Here’s what I did:

* installed anyremote, anyremote-docs, anyremote-j2me-client and ganyremote debian packages from the anyRemote download area on sourceforge.
* copied /usr/share/anyremote-J2ME-client/anyRemote64.jar to the phone via obex, and installed it on the phone. This is the anyRemote client.
* copied nokia-e70.cfg and keyboard.cfg from the cfg-data subdirectory of the anyremote tarball to /etc/anyremote (these files are not in the anyremote debian package for some reason)
* started up ganyremote, and pointed it at /etc/anyremote for config files; made sure to have it show ‘examples’ in the application list
* start anyRemote from ganyremote
* use the gAnyRemote device browser to locate the phone; configured it to always run the nokia E70 sample application when it sees the phone
* started up the anyRemote client on the phone; searched for computer, found it, connected to it

With the E70 application selected, you essentially get bluetooth keyboard functionality. With the ‘keyboard’ application selected, you get a few keys mapped to the numeric phone keypad.

With this, I can put Evince in presentation mode and move between slides by using the phone’s joystick. If I leave the gAnyRemote application running I just have to connect to the computer from the phone, fire up the anyRemote client, and I’m in business.