I was on the train today, needed some of the Boost manuals, and had no internet connection. So I wanted to use my phone (an old HTC Prophet with Windows Mobile 6.1) as a network access point to browse over GPRS/EDGE. As I found out, it is fairly simple with Blueman and it even provides NetworkManager integration, so all NetworkManager-capable applications can be notified about the connectivity. Windows Mobile 6.1 allows tethering over a Bluetooth PAN (Personal Area Network); but there is another method called DUN (Dial Up Networking), which I will not describe here. So here is a step-by-step tutorial what I did for my PAN approach, with a few (german) screenshots, tested on Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid:

• Since my laptop was running on Ubuntu Lucid, there was already a recent Blueman version in the Ubuntu repos available. On older systems, you may want to add the Blueman Launchpad PPA.

  $ sudo apt-add-repository ppa:blueman/ppa  # only necessary on pre-lucid systems
  $ sudo aptitude update
  $ sudo aptitude install blueman
  

• Note that this also removes possibly installed gnome-bluetooth packages since Blueman is an adequate replacement for the GNOME Bluetooth UI.

• After the installation has finished, I had to enable the NMPANSupport plugin for NetworkManager 0.8 by right-clicking on the Blueman icon in the GNOME notification area and selecting “Plugins”. For older NetworkManager versions, there is also a plugin for NetworkManager 0.7, called NMIntegration.

  

• Then I activated tethering on my phone (“Programs” → “Internet Sharing” on my Windows Mobile 6.1, but YMMV). Apparently this was neccesary with my model, because without tethering enabled I could not get a Bluetooth PAN connection in the next step.

  

• I paired the phone and my laptop via Bluetooth, and created a PAN (Personal Area Network) by connecting to the “Network Access Point” service on the phone. In Blueman, all you have to do after pairing is right-click on the device and select “Connect To: Network Access Point”. This creates a new network device bnep0 which is automagically configured through NetworkManager (using stateless address autoconfiguration).

  

  (Yes, my phone is called Leia… I also have a yet another HTC Prophet for testing purposes, which is called Luke )

• However, in my setup, though I was able to ping certain IP adresses on the internet, DNS lookups timed out for some reason. It got better when I explicitly set an IP address for the Bluetooth PAN driver on my phone, and did the tethering process all over again.

  

• And off I went with mobile internet access. Woo-hoo! \o/

I may also add that the NetUsage plugin in Blueman is very reasonable to use After activated, the network usage can be viewed by right-clicking on the Blueman icon and selecting “Network Usage”.