Use your cell phone as a remote control on Ubuntu
Finally I bought a USB bluetooth adapter to use on my Eee PC.
Sometime ago, I saw some tips on how to use the cell phone as a remote control. As my cell phone has bluetooth, and as I never used it for something useful, I was willing to test this feature.
I heard about amora, but it seems to work on super cell phones (not my case). I didn’t test it, so I don’t know if it will work for me, but before buy this adapter, I saw this post, talking about bluepad. It sounds like a good solution for mortals like me…
So I installed BluePad on Hardy (Ubuntu Beta) on my desktop and on Gutsy (Current Ubuntu) on my Eee PC. In both it works good. On Ubuntu I sent to the cell phone the part that runs on it.
The Gutsy bluetooth support is very good, but on Hardy it’s even better. I’m using bluepad + Ubuntu on class and speeches. Maybe I’ll record bluepad running on my Eee PC and put it on youtube… 
I’m going to share my secret with you. There is this sweet Ubuntu package “openssh-server” that makes your console reachable from the outside. I use ADSL and have dynamic IP/no hostname, so I mapped a port in the router (easy task) and installed noip2 (which needs a free account in the noip website).
Then I downloaded midpssh, which is a ssh client for cell phones and installs just like a game. Configured it using my noip account and the remapped router port. Now I can control my computer everywhere using my cell phone. I just get to a terminal screen where I can even control my graphical apps using dcop (e.g. ktorrent using the ktshell script).
I have heard people uses bluetooth device polling to block/unblock screen using hcitool, if you want to try.
Very cool.
Unfortunately, I don’t use internet on my cell phone… It’s very expensive here.
Cool stuff! Which USB bluetooth adapter did you get?
I’ve also found anyremote (http://anyremote.sourceforge.net/) works quite well for me. The GUI is a bit messy, but for the most part it works fine, and it’s even scriptable! I haven’t looked into the scripting, but I think it mainly uses the dcop/dbus family. Works with any phone with JSR-82!
You didn’t mention your phone model. I suppose you are not using Sony Ericsson phone, because the feature is in build in the phone. You just need a profile for the application you want to control. https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BluetoothRemoteControl
Randy,
A generic USB bluetooth adapter.
Onkar, it’s a nokia 6085.
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Seems to work fine with an n95 – once i got the problems with the server sorted:
Had to upgrade the bluez-utils package that came with hardy to be able to connect, and build from svn for screenshots to work.
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