Kdebluetooth - what a mess!

[Gene Heskett]

On Wednesday 20 May 2009, Timothy Murphy wrote:
>I'm trying to use bluetooth under Fedora-10/KDE.
>
>There is an application called Kdebluetooth4,
>but it appears to me to be completely useless.
>Running it (from the KDE Menu) creates a bluetooth icon in the panel,
>but left-clicking on this appears to have no effect whatever.
>Right-clicking on it offers a choice of:
>Send File, Device Manager, Settings, About and Exit.
>Clicking on Device Manager gives me a blank window
>called Bluetooth Device Manager.
>Clicking on New at the bottom of this window
>does indeed take me through a cycle which shows my phone,
>but when I highlight it I am told
>"Sorry, your bluetooth device does not support input services".
>At this point kdebluetooth4 crashed.
>
>Restarting the bluetooth service, and re-entering kdebluetooth4,
>I chose Settings this time.
>But that was equally useless.
>It listed my phone (a Sony Ericsson T630)
>but did not offer me any choices.
>
>There appears to be no documentation at all for this application.
>In my view, no Fedora application should be accepted
>without at least a README file.

There is not much that can be done for bt for telephones as shipped by fedora.

It will (I get from the bluetooth list) take the latest install of Bluz, 
possibly even from the svn, and a 2.6.30-rc6 kernel since rc6 contains some 
fixes needed to the kernel also.  I did have it working as a wire (rs232) 
substitute for a short time using 2.6.30-rc2, but at that point it was known 
that the links for bt headsets and telephones was still broken.  One would 
think that in nearly a decade, that BT stuff would just work, but there seems 
to be a very limited number of developers actually working on it.  Reading 
between the lines, I get the impression that the standard itself is very 
ambiguous, and it needs new code for almost every chipset that comes out 
because of the 'exceptions' to the rules when one maker does something 
different just because that is how his people interpret the "standard".

Best to check with the folks on <linux-bluetooth at vger.kernel.org> for the 
status of support for your Sony/Erikson phone.  I can't speak for 
kdebluetooth4 as I've never been able to make it run long enough to open a 
display.  Like you, and now with kde-4.2.3, I get the taskbar icon when I 
launch it.  No devices are shown in the device menu, not even the usb dongle 
that is plugged into this machine.  So kdebluetooth4 now runs, but doesn't 
seem to be able to connect.  From a dmesg|grep Blue:
[   11.637981] Bluetooth: Core ver 2.15
[   11.638049] Bluetooth: HCI device and connection manager initialized
[   11.638053] Bluetooth: HCI socket layer initialized
[   11.700012] Bluetooth: Generic Bluetooth USB driver ver 0.5
[   24.603448] Bluetooth: L2CAP ver 2.13
[   24.603451] Bluetooth: L2CAP socket layer initialized
[   24.760010] Bluetooth: BNEP (Ethernet Emulation) ver 1.3
[   24.760013] Bluetooth: BNEP filters: protocol multicast
[   24.836712] Bluetooth: SCO (Voice Link) ver 0.6
[   24.836714] Bluetooth: SCO socket layer initialized
[   25.572170] Bluetooth: RFCOMM socket layer initialized
[   25.572181] Bluetooth: RFCOMM TTY layer initialized
[   25.572184] Bluetooth: RFCOMM ver 1.11

The SCO stuff I think is new with 2.6.30-rc6, I don't recall seeing it at -rc2 
when I was last using it as an rs232 substitute.
And I think that is what your phone needs?  I don't have such a toy here.

Good luck Tim.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
The NRA is offering FREE Associate memberships to anyone who wants them.
<https://www.nrahq.org/nrabonus/accept-membership.asp>

	"I thought you were trying to get into shape."
	"I am. The shape I've selected is a triangle."