Monday 18 May 2009

Bluetooth support in NetworkManager

Over the past week, with rock star Dan Williams, we've been working on Bluetooth support in NetworkManager. You can now access the Internet using your Bluetooth mobile phone as long as:
  1. You want to use PAN, and not DUN
  2. You're ready to use the console to set it up
  3. and finally, you have the fixes lying on my hard-drive (or in Dan's e-mail inbox)
This should hopefully be working for Fedora 12.

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wouldn't it be better to provide some nice, cool DUN integration with gnome-bluetooth as something like blueman already does? This already provides bluetooth integration with NetworkManager 0.7 and I can currently use blueman to get Internet access from my mobile phone with a couple mouse clicks - no need for console set up etc.

Unknown said...

Seconded Anonymous comment. Blueman does it right way - bluetooth stack does all connection stuff and creating rfcomm device, and pass it to the NetworkManager. Please integrate it in gnome-bluetooth, so we can finally deal with it.

Bastien Nocera said...

Except that 1) Blueman's UI is oh-so-wrong, 2) Blueman developers chose to botch the Internet access support and didn't integrate things properly into NetworkManager, 3) There's code in NetworkManager to handle DUN, but it's missing ModemManager integration to check whether the device is CDMA or GSM. So, no, we're not going to hack things like together like they did, we're doing it properly.

James Ogley said...

So sweet, NM+BT+MM=mobile broadband without wiring in my N95.

Beers all around!

Anonymous said...

For the sake of users.

1) What is PAN what is DUN? Users don't know and don't care. Please don't make use have to choose.

2) Isn't there another way?

3) I hope they make their way into NM releases.

Bastien Nocera said...

Anonymous seems to be completely oblivious to the way I (and many others) write software. So for his sake:

1) "Personal Area Networking", and "Dial-Up Networking", you might have to choose, but this obviously won't be what you have to choose for

2) Of course there is, it's not like it's finished

3) It will

Anonymous said...

yes! I love you guys! Been hoping for this in NM for a while now. Poking around with scripts that do voodoo stuff to bnep0 and only work half the time gets old fast...

for any readers wondering how this is useful: the bluetooth mode of the Internet Connection Sharing feature on all Windows Mobile phones uses PAN. PAN/DUN isn't a decision you're really going to make on your computer, in most cases; it's a question of which method the hardware you're trying to work with uses. Ideally NM will support both in the end.

be nice when NM can hit the quadfecta: my phone can share its connection over WLAN, USB, Bluetooth PAN and Bluetooth DUN. Right now, WLAN and USB are supported by NM...:)

Eugenia Loli said...

>2. You're ready to use the console to set it upThis soured the deal, sorry.

Anonymous said...

eugenia: er. well. look at the rest of the post:

"and finally, you have the fixes lying on my hard-drive (or in Dan's e-mail inbox)"

it's fairly clearly not meant to be ready for public consumption yet. bastien is just letting us know they're working on it.

Computer Repair said...
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