Tuesday, November 27, 2007

BlueZ, bluetooth device management utility for Linux

First of all, you have to be sure that you have the newer Linux kernel release, the you need a set of utility programs for Bluetooth devices management. The table below shows the packages name and its purpose. You may install the versions of these tools that could be included with your Linux distribution or compile and install them from source.

Utility programs for managing Bluetooth devices

Package

Purpose

bluez-libs

The application library that all other Bluetooth tools require to function

bluez-utils

Main utilities that enable you to initialize and control Bluetooth devices

bluez-sdp

Service discovery protocol tools that enable the advertisement and discovery of Bluetooth services

bluez-pan

Tools that enable personal area networking using Bluetooth

bluez-hcidump

A debugging tool that permits the monitoring of Bluetooth packets

bluez-bluefw

The firmware for Broadcom chipset-based Bluetooth devices

If you want to compile the tools from source code, compile and install the by the order shown in the above table to avoid dependency problems.

You may obtain pre-compiled versions of the BlueZ for Red Hat Linux as RPMs, for Debian stable as .deb packages (current Debian releases are already include BlueZ), and as packages suitable for the Sharp Zaurus Linux PDA. You can download them, along with the source code packages, from the BlueZ download page at http://www.bluez.org/.

To determine whether your Bluetooth system is working, you need to install only the bluez-libs and bluez-utils packages, and also bluez-bluefw if your dongle contains a Broadcom chip (you can determine this from Marcel Holtmann's Bluetooth hardware page at http://www.holtmann.org/linux/bluetooth/devices.html). Install the rest when you have verified that everything is working properly.

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