Getting to the Internet via Treo 700p on Linux
I purchased a Treo 700p a few weeks ago as a replacement for my Sony T637 and my Palm T3. The T3 died and just never came back. I need to have a Palm device in order to share passwords with my co-workers (TealSafe is great for this). I didn’t want to be carrying two devices anymore, so I got the 700p.
The short review of the 700p: It’s a palm. I get some hangs, some strange behavior, but it’s otherwise very nice. I can get Internet access form anywhere, and now that I’m taking the bus into work, that gives me a lot of time to catch up on my e-mail on my way in so I can plan my day (yay Chatteremail).
But now on to what I wanted to do in the first place - let my Fedora Core 5 laptop connect to the Internet via bluetooth to the Treo. There’s a lot of links out there that say “Oh yea, works fine.” Without actually giving directions or hints.
I just got it working. See what I did after the jump.
First (and this is something I got working a long time ago), get your laptop and Treo to pair up. This allows each device to see the other. Assuming you have bluetooth working on your laptop, tell the Treo to turn on its bluetooth and set the visibility to be either Visible or Temporary. From the laptop, run hcitool scan to look for remote devices. This should find the Treo. Now you’ve got the bluetooth MAC and you can enter that into /etc/bluetooth/rfcomm.conf under the device section.
Next, restart bluetooth (/etc/init.d/bluetooth restart) and you should be able to open minicom and make a connection to /etc/rfcomm0. At that point, you should be asked for a PIN on both the Fedora box and the Treo. Enter the same number. Once that’s set, the devices are now paired and you shouldn’t need to enter the PIN again.
Oh yea. In order for you to actually get to the ‘net via the Treo (from Verizon anyway), you need to have their DUN profile enabled. But they don’t call it DUN. they call it either ‘tethering’ or ‘BBA Connect’ where BBA means BroadBand Access. It’s an extra $15/mo over and above everything else that Verizon is charging you for.
Assuming you have BBA Connect enabled, you can now create a PPP configuration and use it to connect to the ‘net. I got a lot of starting information from kenkinder.com, so here’s the configuration that’s working for me. Put this in /etc/ppp/peers/treo_evdo:
connect ‘/usr/sbin/chat -v “” AT OK ATD#777 CONNECT’
rfcomm0
115200
debug
defaultroute
usepeerdns
connect-delay 10000
user (your_phone_number)@vzw3g.com
show-password
crtscts
lock
passive
lcp-echo-failure 200
lcp-echo-interval 65535
Now you should be able to say pppd call treo_evdo and take a look at /var/log/messages while you do this as any errors will show up there. I’m not sure why, but for the first hour or two of testing this out, I kept getting an ERROR message for each character that was sent to the Treo. I tried it again today and it just worked. I was getting errors from both bluetooth and USB connections. Oh yea, using USB? Replace the rfcomm0 with ttyUSB1. If I used ttyUSB0, the Treo reset itself. The downside of this is that if you have other USB serial devices, the number will increment, so it’s hard to guarantee that it’ll always be ttyUSB1. You might be able to use udev to create a new device that is always the Treo.
November 24th, 2006 at 8:43 pm
So, I’ve been working through this, and I *mostly* have it working. I’m on Sprint, so my username is obviously of a different form, but the scripts should otherwise be much the same.
The problem is that when I try to connect, and send AT or ATZ to the Treo, I get back
“ERROR” every time, without fail. It’s bizarre. I have no idea what to do about it, since I don’t see any way to get any sort of real feedback. Any ideas? Is there some way to get feedback from the Treo on attempted PPP connections?
November 24th, 2006 at 10:14 pm
I’ve been spending more time getting this working (Im using it now from my in-laws house, so I know it does work). I got the ERROR message and sometimes I’d get nothing returned with the Treo giving me a ‘connection in progress…’ message on the screen.
Here’s a few things I tried to do to get things working again:
- reboot the treo
- reboot the Linux box
- cycle bluetooth on and off on the treo
If things get really strange, remove the Linux box from the list of trusted devices and start over. It’s good to know this isn’t just a Verizon thing with the ERROR message, so it’s some strange Linux or Treo defect.