Bluetooth woes (again)

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Mon, 2015-10-26 at 14:01 -0700, Rick Stevens wrote:
> On 10/26/2015 01:33 PM, Greg Woods wrote:
> > 
> > On Mon, Oct 26, 2015 at 2:27 PM, Patrick O'Callaghan
> > <pocallaghan at gmail.com <mailto:pocallaghan at gmail.com>> wrote:
> > 
> >     Then why do my BT devices (mouse, headphones, an external
> > speaker
> >     system) show up under the BT settings dialogue?
> > 
> > 
> > Maybe those devices can work with or without the dongle? Or maybe
> > these
> > devices are somehow different than the devices I have experience
> > with,
> > that used Bluetooth to communicate with the dongle, but didn't
> > require
> > any Bluetooth software on the system, they showed up as USB
> > devices.
> 
> Those sorts of devices often have full-up driver stuff built into the
> dongle, so the dongle itself does all the wireless stuff required
> without bothering the system. Then, yes, they appear as USB devices
> because that's all the dongle presents to the USB port. They're not
> general-purpose BT dongles. My Logitech wireless keyboard/mouse does
> precisely that. The wireless mouse shows up in "lsusb" as a USB-PS2
> wireless mouse, but NOT as a BT mouse (because it isn't BT).

Which is what my extra mouse/kb combo does, as I've said.

> I have a Broadcom USB BT dongle. The BT dongle shows up in an "lsusb"
> as a BT dongle.  Remember, Bluetooth means it uses RF in the correct
> frequency bands and adheres to the Bluetooth protocols and that's all
> it means.

Mine too, and it shows up under lsusb. It has a BT MAC address which
appears under the settings dialogue, and it's also visible to hcitool
and hciconfig.  i.e. the system unquestionably knows that it's a BT
device. What it does with that information is another matter.

poc