Draft

Bluetooth on Ubuntu

Introduction

Bluetooth is finally emerging as a robust and widely supported local area communications technology, for short-distance wireless data transfer. Bluetooth is being used for communications with cellphones, cameras, headsets and microphones, PDA's and storage devices.

Devices

Most of the newer laptops come with bluetooth support built right in. If in case you are using a desktop, or donot have bluetooth support built in, you can use usb bluetooth dongles to get bluetooth support.

A list of bluetooth devices supported under linux is listed [http://www.holtmann.org/linux/bluetooth/features.html here]. If your device has a hci-version listed, it should work under linux.

Installation and Configuration

Open up a terminal window, and install the requisite packages and their dependencies.

sudo apt-get install bluez-utils

Then, connect your bluetooth device if you are using one. Then restart the bluetooth services by doing

sudo /etc/init.d/bluez-utils restart

Verify that your bluetooth device has been detected, and the appropriate modules loaded by viewing the lsusb (in case of usb device) output.

lsusb output:

Device 005: ID 0a12:0001 Cambridge Silicon Radio, Ltd Bluetooth Dongle (HCI mode)

Also, view the output of the command hcitool dev which will give you a listing of bluetooth devices on your computer.

hcitool output:

Devices:
        hci0    00:11:95:00:1A:CF

Your bluetooth device will have a different id. If you get all zeros, then try restarting the bluez-utils service and try again.