[gnome-bluetooth] Enabling serial rfcomm in gnome-bluetooth

[Jud Craft]

Hey there.  Fedora 11 preview release, with its new gnome-bluetooth stack.

I'm trying to use BitPim for one of my cell phones, but BitPim seems
to only work well with COM ports.  From an article at Ars Technica
[1], I read how to map a Bluetooth channel to a com-port using
/etc/bluetooth/rfcomm.conf.  (Under Windows the mapping is done
automatically, but you must specify it in Linux, I guess).

Here's my problem:  Bluetooth is not mapping the channel automatically at
startup, even though I figure that's the purpose of rfcomm.conf.

Ars Technica mentions that in the Bluetooth properties in GNOME, you
must check the "Enable Serial" option to activate the rfcomm mappings.
 However, I know that the Bluetooth stack in GNOME has been changed
from Bluez to something new (just the generic gnome-bluetooth, I
guess), and the current Bluetooth Properties does not provide this option.

Basically, I'm not sure how to enable the rfcomm mappings.  If I
manually issue a
command from the console (like "rfcomm connect /dev/rfcomm0 [MAC
address of phone] [channel number]") I get a "permission denied", and
if I do that as root, BitPim can see it but not use it.  So I can't do
it on my own manually; the correct workflow and permissions to do it
elude me.

Does anyone have any ideas?

1.  http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2007/12/using-a-bluetooth-phone-with-linux.ars