understanding/troubleshooting gnokii

I've been using gnokii 0.6.31 for more than a year with no problem
(except for the delete command, so I still manually delete msgs from
the cellphone). It has worked with both Nokia models c1-01 and c2-01.

The system (from the About option) is:
GTK+ 2.24.20 / GLib 2.38.1
Locale: en_US.UTF-8 (charset: UTF-8)
Operating System: Linux 3.11.0-12-generic (i686)

I use Kubuntu, and its own About says it uses
KDE Platform Version 4.11.5

The hardware is a Lenovo S100C netbook, with built-in bluetooth.

As I said, I've used this setup, with a python program I wrote and
have been using over more than 3 yrs, with little problem.

A month ago, I got an error and could not connect with my
phones (I use 2 c1-01 and 1 c2-01 nokia models). This was the error I
was getting:

Can't connect: Operation now in progress
Couldn't open PHONET device: Operation now in progress
Telephone interface init failed: Command failed.
Quitting.
Command failed


After some double-checking, I suspected that the internal bluetooth
hardware had been getting flaky and had now failed completely.

So I bought a USB bluetooth dongle, and after some tweaking, the system
worked again.

But last week, I somehow lost the dongle. So I bought three more
dongles (same brand). 

But it doesn't work anymore and I keep getting the error message above.

I used to be able to use my cellphones to discover and pair with the
netbook, give a passcode, and establish a connection. I can't now.
There is no response from the netbook.

I used to be able to use the netbook to browse and download files from
the cellphones. Now the netbook can't exchange data with the phones.

The terminal command hcitool dev can see both the internal bluetooth
hardware and external dongles. The commend hcitool scan hangs if I
remove all dongles (and use only the internal bluetooth hardware), but
with an external dongle, it can discover the cellphones (name and
bluetooth addr) of the cellphones around it. But it cannot connect to
them. And gnokii gives the error above.

Any suggestion or help would be appreciated.

Roberto Verzola

PS. I use the system to keep in touch with several thousand farmers for
distance education and training. So they're offline now, and I'm
desperate for a solution. I will probably buy another computer next.









Can't connect: Operation now in progress
Couldn't open PHONET device: Operation now in progress
Telephone interface init failed: Command failed.
Quitting.
Command failed