On Sat, 30 Jan 2010 16:33:36 -0800
Russell Senior <[email protected]> dijo:

>>>>>> "Daniel" == Daniel Johnson <[email protected]> writes:
>
>Daniel> I've never gotten bluetooth to work reliably with my thinkpad.
>
>I've had bluetooth working on my T42, but I haven't used it for a
>couple years.
>
>Bluetooth comes it two grades, class1 and class2.  Class 1 is designed
>for 100m, Class 2 is designed for 10m.  Also, bluetooth uses 2.4GHz,
>same as wifi, so it's natural to expect some interference.

There's also a class 3, although I've never heard of any devices that
use it because it is so low power. Most devices these days are class 2,
although my neighbor's new HP printer must be class 1 because it is
presenting a strong signal to my Thinkpad which is at least 20m
away.

I didn't see where Mike mentioned what model Thinkpad he has. But at
least I can say that Bluetooth on my T61 has always worked well,
although getting different distros to get it working has sometimes been
an issue. And, once I get the required modules working I never have a
problem with the connection. Ditto for wifi, and I often have both
working at the same time without issue. I have no idea where the module
is located, though.

During a recent voyage through various distros the only one which had
issues was Debian Squeeze. After a week I never did get bluetooth
working, although I didn't spend much time on it. I had other more
serious issues with Squeeze that eventually caused me to abandon it.
Bluetooth "just worked" when I installed OpenSuse 11.1 and 11.2, and
Fedora 11 and 12.

I bought my first bluetooth device (a mouse) back in my Ubuntu days
when the latest and greatest was Gutsy. I had issues getting it
working, but eventually I discovered a utility called Blueman that was
not in the repos. When I installed it Blueman installed a list of
dependencies, and uninstalled quite a few bluetooth packages that
Ubuntu came with. Blueman worked well and I was happy with it. 

When I left Ubuntu I was at Jaunty. I never installed Blueman on Jaunty
because by the time of Jaunty the Ubuntu developers had gotten
bluetooth working reasonably well without it. I should add that when
Intrepid was released it came with a major rewrite of a lot of
bluetooth utilities and modules. I did have an occasional problem with
my mouse disconnecting under Intrepid and Jaunty, but it was easy to
reconnect when it happened, which was about once a week. 

When I installed Fedora 11 I noticed that it came with Blueman. And I
have to say that bluetooth is working better for me on Fedora 11 than
it ever did on any version of Ubuntu. For example, I bought a pair of
audiophile headphones when I had Hardy and they worked well, but after
the upgrade to Intrepid they quit working and I could never get a peep
out of them. With Fedora 11 they work perfectly again. So does my
phone. 

As a not very scientific effort at troubleshooting, here is a partial
list of packages that I have installed. I obtained this list just by
searching in Yumex on "bluetooth":

blueman, bluez, bluez-alsa (both 32- and 64-bit), bluez-cups,
bluez-gnome, bluez-gnome-analyzer, bluez-gstreamer (both 32- and
64-bit), bluez-hcidump, bluez-libs, bluez-libs-devel (both 32- and
64-bit), gnome-bluetooth, gnome-bluetooth-libs (both 32- and 64-bit),
gnome-bluetooth-libs-devel (both 32- and 64-bit), gnome-user-share,
gnome-vfs2-obexftp, gvfs-obexftp, kde-bluetooth, libbctl (both 32- and
64-bit), obex-data-server, obexd, pulseaudio-module-bluetooth, rfkill.

Perhaps looking through the above list will help Mike find a missing
package that will get his bluetooth working.

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