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Fremantle Unsupported Bluetooth profiles

Revision as of 13:06, 30 November 2010

There are several Bluetooth profiles officially missing/unsupported in Fremantle that are however supported by the upstream BlueZ project or can be made to work with some simple hacks.

DUN server

There's a tool called pnatd (short for PhoNet AT Daemon) which can act as a proxy between the cellular modem PhoNet interface and a TTY device.

Example script

sdptool add --channel 1 DUN
while true; do
        rfcomm -S --listen -1 1 /usr/bin/pnatd '{}'
        sleep 1
done

There is one known issue: Most likely due to a bug in the way that the Bluetooth and TTY subsystems in the kernel interact in this use case data can be lost if the DUN client starts immediately sending AT commands when the connection is created. This can e.g. be worked around by adding a 1 second delay to the chat script on the client side.

HID host (i.e. support for Bluetooth keyboards and mice)

Fremantle comes with the bluetoothd input plugin installed but disabled through /etc/bluetooth/main.conf

As shown by Johan Hedberg at the Maemo Summit 2009:

Your main.conf should look like:

[General]

#List of plugins that should not be loaded on bluetoothd startup
DisablePlugins = network,input,hal
...

As root change it to:

[General]

#List of plugins that should not be loaded on bluetoothd startup
DisablePlugins = network,hal
...

After saving, do a

stop bluetoothd [RETURN]
start bluetoothd [RETURN]

Note that editing the bluetooth/main.conf file will conflict with SIXAXIS(TM) Support, the controller will not connect to the device until this is reversed.

Bluetooth Keyboard

Bluetooth keyboards should pair like any other bluetooth device.

You'll need to complete some extra steps to get the layout working properly. See Fremantle Bluetooth Keyboard Layout.

The new application package "extkbd" (currently in Extras-Testing) simplifies the usage of external Keyboards.

Bluetooth Mouse

For a bluetooth mouse, extra steps are also required. By default, mouse sensitivity is unusably high. There are some modified versions of the evdev_drv.so driver (and bluetooth.ko module) available in this talk.maemo.org thread that will fix this problem.

Depending on the mouse, you may also need to install the bluez-compat package from Debian and libxmuu1, then run "hidd --search" in order to pair. See this post for more details.

PAN

Fremantle comes with the bluetoothd network plugin installed but disabled through /etc/bluetooth/main.conf - to use your N900 as a PAN server for other clients (such as N8x0) just enable this.

If you want to connect to another device over PAN, see Bluetooth PAN for more detailed information.

Phone Book Access Profile (PBAP) and IrMC Sync