[sclug] USB Bluetooth

[Robin Lewis]

Bluetooth support works quite well on my Nokia 3110c for obtaining an
rfcomm device for GPRS dialup, and for doing strange things with HID
emulation to remote control my eee :P

There's a *tiny* USB bluetooth dongle for about ?7 on Scan:
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/LM-Tech-LM505-Worlds-Smallest-Bluetooth-Nano-Dongle-USB2-V20-with-ADR-Support-upto-20m
I have one of these and it is literally plug and play on recent
kernels. Not tried it on anything older than 2.6.24 that I can recall,
but I don't think standard Bluetooth device support has changed that
much in recent years.

2008/11/26 David Given <dg at cowlark.com>:
> Graham Swallow wrote:
> [...]
>> Can anyone recommend a USB donge to do the bluetooth
>> and the software to do the transfers. What will I see?
>> a usb drive? Or something like kpilot?
>
> Nothing like as nice. Phones speak a high-level file transfer protocol
> called OBEX that is slow, clumsy and unreliable. From Linux, you get
> ftp-like tools to access the phone file system. Gnome and KDE both do
> reasonable jobs of giving you friendly access to this; Ubuntu Intrepid
> will even manage to mount the phone as a user file system via FUSE, so
> you can actually access it from the shell.
>
> But mostly I'd recommend you don't --- a simple ls in a directory
> containing 100 files just took six and a half *minutes* on my Motorola
> PEBL. (Don't buy one. They're awful.) And then half the file system
> functions don't work --- you get obscure file system errors when you try
> to rename files across directories, for example.
>
> However, you can also use OBEX in send-file/receive-file mode, where can
> push a file to another Bluetooth device, and that works pretty well.
> It's definitely the easiest way of up- or downloading stuff. I'd
> recommend pushing files from the phone to the PC, though.
>
> The good news is that Linux' Bluetooth hardware support is pretty good,
> and miles in front of Windows; you can buy pretty much any cheapo
> Bluetooth adapter and it'll just work. You may not get the new
> high-speed Bluetooth, though.
>
> (The underlying Bluetooth technology *itself* is actually moderately
> cool; there are a number of other Bluetooth protocols, like PAN, that
> work pretty well. It's just a shame that OBEX is so awful.)
>
> --
> ???? ?????????????? ????? http://www.cowlark.com ?????
> ?
> ? ?'?',?N??S?'???(3=T)?M?2=T??+/(V?"?M),(V?"M),(V,?V)?"(V,V?1?1)?"?M)'
> ? --- Conway's Game Of Life, in one line of APL
>
>