indiboi.com

I’ve wanted to establish a Personal Area Network with Bluetooth ever since I bought my Tungsten T in November of 2002. I never managed to get it working, but finally… Whoo!

Thankfully the state of Bluetooth in Gentoo has improved dramatically. Once I finally stopped reading the howtos (which are horribly out of date) I managed to get almost everything working properly. I can browse the internet on my Palm using Bluetooth connected to my workstation as an access point. It’s really mostly useless, but it’s just one of those “well, that’s cool” sort of things.

Apparently the /etc/init.d/bluetooth script starts up everything provided you’ve configured it in /etc/conf.d/bluetooth properly. The default is to not start everything, but one does need everything, along with the ppp package.

My Bluetooth dongle is based on the Broadcom chip, which was another world of annoyance, apparently it’s so ass-backwards that it needs firmware to be loaded onto it at initialization, without that it is worse than useless. It still doesn’t work properly if I plug the dongle in while the computer is running, but if I boot with the dongle plugged in, then Gentoo loads the firmware, etc, and all seems to be well.

Anyway, the whole point is that now I have that working, but I also have OBEX working too, along with syncing. I’m not sure why yet, but the gnome-obex-server won’t respond to sends from the Palm. I’ve found that the opd package does work fine though. I’m at a loss, because the gnome-obex-server accepts files just fine when I send them from the RAZR, and the RAZR accepts files sent from the Palm. There’s something weird between the Palm & computer.

Gnome-pilot version 2.0.15 (which is masked in portage) apparently has the patches necessary to allow for network sync using Bluetooth. I fiddled for hours upon hours trying to determine why it wouldn’t sync, when it was in fact gnome-pilot that was busted.

[Device0]
type=4
name=bt
ip=
timeout=2


That’s all that shows up in the gpilotd file, an apparently it’s enough, lol. I did put in the net:any that is required as the device for jpilot and pilot-xfer, but I guess it filtered out when writing to the file.