I am having difficulty with my Smartbook's Bluetooth. I would like to share files between my phone and MX.

When I boot, my Bluetooth icon has the little red x. I try to turn on bluetooth and nothing. Menu selections imply (via shading) that bluetooth is actually on, while the Preferences message is "Bluetooth is disabled".

Suggestions?

I did some tests between my smartbook and an old rooted T-mobile G1 phone I have laying around that is running the android 2.2 based Super F ROM. and has astro bluetooth installed.

receiving files on the smartbook seems to require gnome-user-share to be installed (just do sudo apt-get install gnome-user-share)

once that is done you should now be able to click on preferences and then receive files. a dialog should then pop up. just click receive files in downloads folder over bluetooth.

I tried pairing my phone to the Efika by just setting the efika to visible and then initiating pairing from the android phone. This did not seem to work. However
setting up the phone to be discoverable and then initiating pairing from the efika worked.

from then on I was able to send files to the phone from the bluetooth menu just fine and after I installed the package mentioned above I could also send stuff back to the efika from the phone as well.

Sending things to the efika did not seem to work even though I had paired with the device unless I set the efika to be visible in the bluetooth menu.

I used Astro Bluetooth to start up an OBEX FTP server on my phone but was unable to browse files on my phone using the browse files on device option.

Other than that I was able to get files sent in both directions using push with the steps I listed above.

I haven't tried this on anything other than the maverick image. Let me know if this helps any.

Unfortunately there seems to be some userspace issues with bluetooth on maverick. If the icon is listed as disabled, first check that your wireless switch on the side of the Smartbook is showing green. If the bluetooth icon is showing up in the panel, but greyed out and you're unable to enable bluetooth, what sometimes helps kick bluez into gear is to suspend the efika, and then bring it back from suspend.

We're currently working on a newer kernel which will easily allow us to use a more up to date userspace.

_________________
Steev Klimaszewski, Genesi USA Inc.
Senior Software Engineer

I was able to re-initialize using the the Suspend trick. That got it working.

I installed the "Personal File Sharing", which seems to be the same as "Gnome File Sharing".

From Efika, I can send a specific file to the phone, but cannot browse files on the phone. No messages, just no response. No Nautilus window opens... seems like it should.

From phone (ZTE 160... piece of crap, I know), I cannot send a file to the Efika. Get message: "Failed to send".

Any suggestions?

Thanks

I was only able to do what I detailed in my previous post. Browsing my phone doesn't work for me either.

Sending files to your Efika should work though.

I would make sure that you have "Visible" checked on your bluetooth icon menu. then go into preferences under the bluetooth menu and then click "receive files" and be sure that "Receive files in Downloads folder over Bluetooth" is checked.

If it still doesn't receive files try changing Accept files to Always.

*NOTE* You will want to undo that last bit and also make your computer not visible again for security reasons once you are done.


In theory it should work a lot better than this but like Steev said the bluetooth stack on armel Maverick isn't so nice. I think I will give things a try with Debian unstable and see what happens. The new 3.x kernel I hope will make things much better.

The kernel side isn't at fault here, it's entirely the issue of bluez userspace. An enterprising user could attempt to build a newer userspace, using the packages from natty, oneiric, or precise, just keep in mind the dependencies may or may not muck up other things that are installed. I don't recall which version of udev is installed on maverick at the moment, but if it's less than 169 you may run into issues with bluez 4.99. bluez 4.98 has an issue with C++ applications (just something to keep in mind if you do development) not being able to compile against them though I believe Ubuntu may apply a patch. 4.96 should work better I believe, unless maverick is using 4.96 already, in which case, you'll want 4.98 and the patch for c++ compilations.

_________________
Steev Klimaszewski, Genesi USA Inc.
Senior Software Engineer