I use bluetooth to transfer podcasts from my laptop to my Palm Centro. A Palm Centro is like an iPhone or a Droid, except less smart-like and more phone-like. This worked beautifully but broke when I upgraded to Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx). There are 2 bugs involved. First, the bluetooth daemon (/usr/sbin/bluetoothd) never gets started. Second, there’s no easy way to start the file transfer daemon automatically (/usr/bin/dund). This used to work automatically, but now it doesn’t. I’ve tried to fiddle with udev rules, but have been unsuccessful. I’ve reported the 2 bugs, but haven’t had any response yet. (bluetoothd bug) (dund bug)

My workaround is a shell script which starts those those daemons if they are not running:

vk-bluetooth-start.sh

#!/bin/bash
    
BLUETOOTH='bluetoothd'
DUN='dund'
    
# first start bluetoothd
if ps ax | grep -v grep | grep $BLUETOOTH > /dev/null
then
    echo "$BLUETOOTH is running."
else
    echo -n "Starting $BLUETOOTH..."
    /usr/bin/sudo /usr/sbin/bluetoothd -u &> /dev/null
    echo "done."
fi
    
# then start dund
if ps ax | grep -v grep | grep $DUN > /dev/null
then
    echo "$DUN is running."
else
    echo -n "Starting $DUN..."
    /usr/bin/sudo /usr/bin/dund --listen --persist --msdun call centro
    echo "done."
fi

And here’s my script which transfers the files to my phone. It uses pilot-link, which I had to compile from source due to a bug in the way that the Ubuntu version addresses large SD cards. This should be fixed in the next version of Ubuntu.

vk-transfer-podcasts.sh

#!/bin/bash
    
output=$(pilot-xfer -p net:any -D /Kingston/AUDIO -i *.mp3 2>&1)
errors=$(echo $output | grep -c "ERROR:")
    
if [ $errors -gt 0 ] ; then
    echo "failure (count: $errors)"
    echo $output
else
    echo -n "success, removing files from laptop..."
    /bin/rm -I $HOME/*.mp3
    echo "done."
fi

If you’re wondering why I use a slow protocol like bluetooth to transfer large files to an SD card, rather than just ejecting the SD card and inserting it into the laptop, well… you haven’t tried to access the SD card on a Palm Centro. #paininthe&^@!