Bluetooth successful file transfer

Wednesday, May 4th, 2005

I tried applying my bluetooth knowledge so far to a Yellowdog 4.0 laptop and was able to send pictures from my phone via bluetooth to the laptop. Here is the configuration:

[rday@bobo rday]$ rpm -qa | grep blue
bluez-hcidump-1.8-1
bluez-bluefw-1.0-4
bluez-utils-2.7-3
bluez-libs-2.7-1
gnome-bluetooth-0.4.1-8
bluez-pin-0.23-1
[rday@bobo rday]$ cat /etc/yellowdog-release
Yellow Dog Linux release 4.0 (Orion)

The only local configuration I did was to change the device name that the bluetooth dongle in the laptop uses to advertise itself. Then I used bluefw to “load the firmware”, whatever that means. And then started the bluetooth service. The pin-helper said that it failed, but the phone and laptop were able to pair successfully anyway. And when I used the phone to examine the advertised services available on the laptop, it reported file transfer and synchronization. Cool.

On Yellowdog, even Nautilus was able to understand “bluetooth:///” as a file path. But it didn’t see my phone. I’ll have to poke at that more.

After the devices were paired, I could start a transfer from the phone and send pictures which magically appeared in my home directory on the laptop.

May 4th, 2005 at 1:24 pm

Trying to get gnome-bluetooth to work on RHEL 4.0WS like it does on Yellowdog has been hard. I’m stuck in dependency hell. It ought to be easy given a working system that I can copy, right?

First problem is that there isn’t a gnome-bluetooth rpm for RHEL. So I have to reach back to RHL 9.0 to get gnome-bluetooth. (I tried installing from source, which compiled and installed successfully, but somehow still doesn’t work.)

Trying to install the old gnome-bluetooth rpm yields a failed dependency:

error: Failed dependencies:
libbtctl.so.1 is needed by gnome-bluetooth-0.4.1-3.i386
libopenobex-1.0.so.0 is needed by gnome-bluetooth-0.4.1-3.i386
libsdp.so.2 is needed by gnome-bluetooth-0.4.1-3.i386
Suggested resolutions:
libbtctl-0.4.1-3.i386.rpm

Trying to install libbtctl yields a further failed dependency:

error: Failed dependencies:
libsdp.so.2 is needed by libbtctl-0.3-4.i386

libsdp.so.2 is provided by bluez-libs-2.7-1 on Yellowdog

I have bluez-libs-2.10-2 on RHEL.

The changelog for this package says that in version 2.8 the dummy SDP library was removed. Doh. I’m stuck on a dependency for a dummy library.

July 26th, 2005 at 6:11 pm

I wasn’t very explicit about the recipe for transfering files between phone and laptop. I just had to figure it out again. I took several false starts and so I’m still not sure what the right procedure is, but I think it is something like this:

• make sure the bluetooth service is running via /etc/init.d/bluetooth status
• start gnome-obex-server (System tools > Bluetooth file sharing)
• use the phone to drive the transaction
• pick a file and send it via bluetooth to the laptop

I don’t think all the business with hcitool are actually required, but it does let you see some reassuring debugging info.