Linux Notes - Installing Bluetooth

Notes and Observations on the installation of Bluetooth on a Linux box

Bluetooth is a point to point wireless networking protocol, with a range of around 10 meters on the smaller devices. I wanted to surf the internet using my Palm Tungsten, and develop a couple of web based utilitys. This document is an attempt to collect together all the problems I had while installing it.

A cheap USB dongle costs around £40, check to see if your device is compatable here: http://www.holtmann.org/linux/bluetooth/devices.html. You'll also need an extention lead as pluging it into the back of the computer causes the signal to be masked. Also, the bluetooth signal won't go through walls.

Installation comprises of downloading the bluetooth drivers, recompiling the kernel and a bit of messing about. This was the first time that I'd done the kernel thing, it took longer to get my head around it than I expected. I'm using RedHat 7.3, and these notes relate to that. Some knowlege of Linux is assumed.

Bluetooth - You Will Need:

• Get The Bluetooth drivers from here: http://bluez.sourceforge.net
• Don't use the bluez-kernel-2.3.tar.gz, download the patch instead.
• The latest stable kernel from here: http://www.kernel.org I used v2.4.20
• The Bluetooth kernel patch http://www.holtmann.org/linux/kernel/
• From kernel 2.5 you won't need to do this as it will be included aleady (apparently).

Installing - How?

• The best instructions I could find are here: http://www.harbaum.org/till/palm/bluetooth/ this section deals with problems that arose from these.
• Update: I recently installed this on Mandrake 9.1, and I didn't need to do any of the Kernel stuff.
• Installing the Kernel (for kernels older than 2.4.21), you can find your kernel version with uname -r

• Generally I followed the instructions in the Kernel-HOWTO.
• You install the patch after stage 1. Unpack the sources, I upacked everything to /usr/src
• I used patch-2.4.20-mh5.gz. To install the patch copy it to /usr/src then:

  # gunzip patch-2.4.20-mh5.gz
  # patch -p0 < 2.4.20-mh5

• The Kernel-HOWTO doesn't mention that you need to run initrd if your booting from SCSI hard disks.
• To save hours of work copy the kernel config file from your previous kernel installation, (assuming you have the default Redhat kernel source installed), eg:

  # cp /usr/src/linux-2.4.18-24.7.x/configs/kernel-2.4.18-i686.config /usr/src/linux-2.4.20/.config

• I used make menuconfig instead of make xconfig. I got more reliable results.

• Installing Bluetooth

• As I use my linux machine as a web server, I found that the pages dissapeared while I was accessing the internet at first I thought this was a routing problem, but it turned out that it was pinching my cable-routers IP address, 192.168.1.1. To solve this, edit /etc/ppp/peers/bluetooth.options and change (at the end) 192.168.1.1:192.168.1.2 to 192.168.1.31:192.168.1.32 or a couple of other unused addresses.
• If you get an error from iptables (where the last line says somthing like: "Perhaps iptables or your kernel needs to be upgraded") you may need to disable ipchains, use rmmod ipchains, I added this to my bluetooth startup script.

Other Problems

Palm Browsers & Proxy Servers

There is a thing with web browsers on the Palm, they use a proxy server. Which is OK when accessing a public site, but if you have a website thats on your private network it won't see it. Here are the browser details I got from Blazer and Web Pro:

One of the main problems with this is that I want to have a private site, hosted on my own network, with this I can't set a .htaccess file to deny access. Normal browsers on my network give an address of 192.168.1.x, as you can see, from above, they use an external address.

I have found the Eudora Internet Suite v2.1 this doesn't require a proxy, but it is a bit old and doesn't display pictures.

Conclusion

When web browsing, performance seems to be on a par with a quick 56k Modem. Don't expect anything fancy, it doesn't work very well with frames, with sound, or anything else other than text. Although it reduces the pictures down. If the page is designed for the small screen, or is simple text, or if you run anything that collects data over the internet, like Avant Go, then it works quite well.