bluetooth in default desktop install?

[Leszek Matok]

Dnia 28-08-2006, pon o godzinie 12:48 -0400, Jesse Keating napisał(a):
> I was under the impression that bluetooth still needed a 
> bunch of hand fiddling to do what you wanted to do, not quite as simple as 
> plugging in a USB storage device.
It depends. I use Bluetooth in my desktop PC. I used it to talk to my
Nokias (move phonebooks, calendar and messages) and use GPRS as backup
link. USB dongle "just works", there were problems with SELinux and
session passwords early in FC5, but now it "just works", too. So the
low-level part works OOTB. All you need to have is a discovery tool and
configuration GUI-s for programs talking Bluetooth. I know KDE has all
that you need.

GNOME, as always, is far behind. gnome-bluetooth-libs give you a
"Bluetooth manager" which simply doesn't work, all it does is scan
around, "properties" doesn't work and it calls devices "Unnamed" until
you call `hcitool scan` manually from the console (hal problem,
probably) ;) Nautilus doesn't have any idea that I have an OBEX device
nearby (compare to Konqueror's bluetooth:/, sdp:/ and obex:/, sigh). The
only thing that really "just works" is the gnome-obex-server, an app
waiting for other devices to send files to the computer. Of course it
could be smarter (it doesn't have any configuration nor any GUI besides
a notification area icon, always drops file in $HOME, luckily doesn't
overwrite anything). Still, it does "just work" till this point. I can
send files from another device to the GNOME workstation. 1/100 of KDE's
capabilities, but still :)

The thing that I had to hand-fiddle as root was adding rfcomm0
to /etc/bluetooth/rfcomm.conf. Maybe it's not even necessary, but I
haven't found any GUI for this task. After this I had to restart the
service "bluetooth", there's GUI for that. So making a serial port over
Bluetooth almost "just worked", the config file is very easy to write if
I have the data (which I have to find using console sdptool, should I
add that with KDE it's few clicks away?).

Then there's biggest problem - system-config-network refused to make my
phone's modem work. It insists to send some strange AT commands to the
modem (no matter what I tell it to do) so the emulated modem doesn't
want to speak with it. I had to go back to 1995 and write my own chat
script!

This thread is about gnome-bluetooth. All it can do is accepting
incoming files from remote devices, but it works, really. I saw
screenshots of sending from Nautilus, but FC5 doesn't have that. Having
it installed by default can make interested parties play with it and
maybe decide to help extending it (if it were written in C, I'd be
working on it since months ;)). OTOH, it can give you lots of useless
bug reports on programs nobody wants to fix :)

Lam
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