On Linux it was never that easy to access your phone's memory, especially not using bluetooth. For a few years I had been using obexftp for this, but pushing files one by one was far from simple.

As a result if I needed a picture from my phone's memory, I either send it from the phone to my CentOS. This works fine for a single file, but is tiresome for a collection. Or (and this is the default at my place) let Brenda's thinkpad synchronize the new photos from my cellphone.

This is very convenient, because Brenda takes care of the photo-collection housekeeping anyway ! (thanks hon)

Still, yesterday I did not want to mess with Windows to get a picture or two so I renewed my knowledge of Obex, especially I reinvestigated obexfs.

Obexfs is a fuse-based filesystem that uses obexftp to connect to the phone and while I had been messing with it in the past, lo and behold it worked almost immediately with the newer obexfs.

On CentOS you only need to install the dkms-fuse and obexfs packages to get it going by: yum install dkms-fuse fuse-obexfs and start bluetooth: service bluetooth start

Then just get the device id from the hcitool scan output, then get the OBEX File Transfer channel from the sdptool browse 00:CA:FE:BA:BE:00 output and when you have both, simply do obexfs -b 00-CA-FE-BA-BE-00 -B 10 /mnt/obex

And then you can access the content:


[dag@rhun ~]$ obexfs -b 00-CA-FE-BA-BE-00 -B 10 /mnt/obex/
[dag@rhun ~]$ ls -l /mnt/obex/
total 4
drwxr-xr-x 1 dag dag 0 Jan 1 1970 Graphics
drwxr-xr-x 1 dag dag 0 Jan 1 1970 Images
drwxr-xr-x 1 dag dag 0 Jan 1 1970 Memory
drwxr-xr-x 1 dag dag 0 Jan 1 1970 Music files
drwxr-xr-x 1 dag dag 0 Jan 1 1970 Recordings
drwxr-xr-x 1 dag dag 0 Jan 1 1970 Themes
drwxr-xr-x 1 dag dag 0 Jan 1 1970 Tones
drwxr-xr-x 1 dag dag 0 Jan 1 1970 Video clips


Nothing more to it, really.

PS It is also possible to make it work with autofs and use obexautofs to automatically scan for any device. However, I could not make it work because it failed to accept more than one option in the config-files (because it does not accept the spaces and none of the workaround seem to work either). So for the time being I will have to use the commandline.

Update: I tried again with obexfs v0.12 and now it works fine. I noticed obexfs automatically detects the channel id for OBEX communication, so you no longer need to use -B option ! This is fantastic as it is much more convenient to use...