[Scottish] Bluetooth woes

[Colin McKinnon]

Hi All,

I recently bought myself a whole PC (having owned the previous one for about 
10 years, replacing the mobo and the memory a few times, the hard disks a 
couple of times....) and had all sorts of grief getting openSuse to get on 
with the hardware. Eventually we came to a compromise - openSuSE would talk 
to my USB devices if I let it fsck /dev/sda5 every time it booted, and take 
forever to start up the software respositories when accessing software 
updates through yast. This was using openSuse 10.2 with an unoffical kernel. 
But after a while I got fed up.

Looking on Distrowatch, I saw that PCLinuxOS had not released for a while - 
I've previously enthused here about the 2007 distro which is still running 
happily on my laptop. Unfortunately a quick boot suggested I was going to 
have more USB problems with this distro. Despite the peer pressure, Iive 
never really liked Ubuntu nor the other Debian based systems (though my 
mother's PC is still going strong with an oldish Debian install). 

I eventually decided to revisit RedHat - Fedora 9 is fairly recently released 
and has a very recent kernel. Indeed all the hardware seems to working very 
well, and yum is actually relatively painless to use. I can't say I'm as 
impressed with what's happenned to KDE - but this is a very early release of 
KDE4 so maybe things will change. 

To get back to the point - yes I've got Fedora 9, but I'm not too adverse to 
changing it, but need a newsish kernel. 

Meanwhile $ork have decided to enroll me in the Order the Blackberry and unto 
me bestow a 8800 device. And while walking around Tesco's at the weekend, a 
Bluetooth dongle fell into my shopping basket. What happy coincidence. At 
least it would be if I could get the damn things to talk to each other. The 
phone recognises the computer, pairs with it and subsequently lists it as a 
paired device - and vice versa for the PC - but it seems like nothing else on 
my PC can find the phone. Konqueror reports 'Protocol not supported 
Bluetooth', Dolhpin doesn't like Bluetooth either, kbtobexclient can't find 
any devices, kbluemon sees no devices, kbluelock sees no devices. The errors 
with the filemanager are obviusly due to a missing I/O slave - but I'd like 
to at least have a *reason* to fix them before trying to do so.

Anybody out there got any ideas?

(I tried setting up bluetooth on the PCLinuxOS laptop but didn't even get this 
far - the package dependancies are all fscked up).

TIA

C.