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Bluetooth is a wireless network protocol, designed for short range distances, low power and low cost. This makes it specially useful in small, mobile devices like mobile phones, PDAs and laptops, but is also used in many other types of devices.

It uses the open or license free 2.4Ghz radio band and does fast frequency hopping to avoid interference with other devices in that band. For more information, see Wikipedia's article.

Contents

Make it work

You want to do your first bluetooth transfer, so you can be sure it works ? Then this article is for you.

  • Find out if you have a bluetooth device: 
hwinfo --bluetooth
  • Switch on bluetooth on your mobile phone and put it next to your computer.
  • Find out which bluetooth devices you can access: 
hcitool scan

Your mobile phone should appear in the output.

  • Point your konqueror to bluetooth:/// and start a file transfer.
  • Note: video clips with the suffix .3gp can be played with the RealPlayer.

Linux support

The Linux kernel includes a bluetooth protocol stack (since 2.4) named bluez. It supports USB, PCMCIA and serial bluetooth devices. In most recent distributions these devices are normally recognized automatically and just 'plug and play'. If not, the modules involved with the protocol are called:

  • bluetooth -- the base
  • l2cap -- named after the protocol L2CAP, which bluetooth uses (can be seen as layer 6/data-link layer from the OSI Model).
  • rfcomm -- Emulates serial RS-232 ports on top of L2CAP

Next to these there are several modules for different types bluetooth devices, like USB, serial port or specific chipsets. (hci_usb, hci_uart, bcm203x, etc.)

After the hardware has been set up, it's time to actually use it. You need some software to scan and 'pair' devices. The Bluez project created several programs to do this (hcitool,hcidump,bluez-pin, etc.).

Applications

  • kmobiletools -- get your SMS, contacts, send SMS, etc
  • MultiSync -- Synchronize contacts,calender,etc
  • bluexmms -- Control XMMS with your bluetooth phone [1]
  • bluemote -- Use your bluetooth phone as a remote control[2]
  • btcid -- Phone status display on computer screen[3]
  • Bluetoooth-alsa -- Use bluetooth audio headsets [4]

See also

External links

Retrieved from "http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/Bluetooth"

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