Problems with bluez and bluetooth headset...

For some time I have been tinkering with my Jabra BT500v and the bluez bluetooth stack. Under SuSE I had only one way of getting it work - bluetooth-alsa with all the extra packages to get it to work (sbc, plugz, btsco, the snd-bt-sco kernel module, and the HCI SCO patch for the kernel). All was simple/(err - possible) and kinda worked (patching the kernel was a pain tho). The bluez was really old (2.19 if I remember correctly) so there were no choices really.

When I moved to Fedora 7 I had everything set to rebuild everything necessary to get it running again. As Fedora 7 should have a new BT stack I would not have to do all the things again as starting from 3.16 you don't need them any more. To my surprise I discovered that Fedora 7 had only 3.9 version of bluez. Not a problem - rebuild with the latest sources - 3.20 is the latest so should be the best so it is a prime candidate.

At the beginning I thought everything was fine (well, after tinkering with the spec file a little). Well I got the amarok to play, I got vlc to play, I got the mplayer to play but what I did not get to play is Skype. The thing I was trying to use the headset with. The thing to what the headset was meant to be used for.

Another blow to my ego was today when I updated my system today and got a kdebluetooth update (1.0 beta 8). After a boot it could not even start - just plain sigserv at the login. Right. The first thing that comes to my mind is that kdebluetooth is liked against an older version of the api that is been redesigned or removed from new version. Tho the interesting part is that the older version worked fine with new bluez, so I'm a bit confused at the moment. Anyway I went back to the 3.9 bluez until I figure out which is the reason for the crashes.

For the moment I have 43 self built/patched rpm's running on my system and no way to track them expect the gray matter called the brain. With every rpm I customize/upgrade for my needs grows the need to track the mainstream for bug fixes and security fixes. With this hack I tried to ease my life by replacing the tracking from 6 to 2. But it seems Ill have to do it the old way or wait for Fedora 8 to come out to make my life little easier. Then again if I can't get Skype running with new bluez I have to go back again. Anyway I'm back in the point where I started.

Anyway hers some links that can help  (or make life more complicated): here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

If I figure out how to how to get it running Ill add another post.

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