Four things which would make my Linux wonderful

1. Presentation controller for my bluetooth phone

In fact this already exists, in many forms apparently. The trick for me was to get it working. If I was to derive it from scratch I would have made a simple, mappable Java app for the phone, and would have written a Python app for the server. In fact this already exists in Xbtrc. The trick for me however, was to get the phone to find the computer. The phone could find other phones, and using the python rfcomm examples, I found the computers could find each other. The problem, it turns out, was the computer needs to be put into discoverable mode for the phone to be able to find it.

dbus-send --system --dest=org.bluez --print-reply /org/bluez/hci0 org.bluez.Adapter.SetMode string:"discoverable"

For whatever reason this doesn’t happen by default when you are in connectible mode. Alternatively you can do hciconfig hci0 piscan or change your bt-applet settings to visible and set the timeout to never.

2. Evolution sync with my phone (Nokia 6230i)
Well, we have gammu/wammu, which give us nokia phone access, and we have opensync, which does syncing, and we have the evolution data server, which we could access directly. But for some reason, these have never been wed.

3. Dynamic xinerama

Why do I have to restart my X server, and loose all my apps, when I want to change video configurations. Logically, if I had xinerama installed, and R and R, I should be able to resize my offboard video card to 0×0 and have all the windows pushed onto the LCD. Then when I resize back to its real size, I should be able to start using the real-estate again.

4. Suspend to ram working properly
As I pointed out in a previous post, S3 (suspend to ram) only just started working “properly” on my IBM T41. However, I have found that the external screen never comes back to life after a suspend. Hopefully someone will pick up on this. sigh. (not that I’m ungrateful)

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Bluetooth Fuse OBEXFS under Debian

Because the Gnome Bluetooth tools are not in Debian it makes it kinda hard to transfer files to a BT enabled phone. However, there is a really neat project out there called OBEXFS, which uses Filesystem in Userspace to mount an OBEX device, like a phone, as another folder on your computer.

First thing is to set up the basic system for using fuse

modprobe fuse

or

echo fuse >> /etc/modules
adduser  fuse

Now, get and compile the obexfs programs

./configure && make && sudo make install

Finally, the magic lines. Nokia phones use channel 10 for OBEX transfer, so:

mkdir -p ~/mnt/bluetooth
obexfs -b <BT MAC ADDRESS> -B 10 ~/mnt/bluetooth/

If you need to find your BT MAC address use:

hcitool scan

Requirements:
apt-get install fuse-utils bluetooth

Blueant Stereo Headphones

Following up from my previous post regarding the BlueAnt bluetooth headset. As you may recall I could not get the software to work correctly, meaning I couldn't use the headset outside of being a hands-free kit. After talking to tech support I was pointed to this file which is the Blueant Browser which should have come with my headset. The version that did, I assume was older and not compatible with the new headset.

So to my objective analysis. I quite like the look of these headphones, however, it really puzzles me why you would make them wrap around the back of your head and not have them be adjustable. One-size-fits-all? I don't think so. It is a real shame, as they are just heavy enough to get uncomfortable after longish periods of wearing.

As stereo output devices they work quite well. Not as well as a pair of hifi quality headphones, but well enough for my purposes.

Under linux, using the alsa-bluetooth driver the headset works quite well as a 2-way (sco) ALSA device, working with my Access Grid and Skype software. However, the A2DP stack didn't work with this headset. To the best of my understanding this is because the blueant headset doesn't support AVDTP which the alsa-bluetooth stack requires. I'm trying to follow this up at the moment, but for now we can only hope!