My jabra finally working with bluez...

As I have hit the bottom on my coding task (a project I have been planning for the past 6 months and writing it for the last month), I needed to get my mind off of it and do something I'm good at - debugging - and what better thing to debug than getting my Jabra to work with Skype. As I gave a shot at it some time ago and wasn't happy with the results, so I tried again.

The distribution is Fedora 8 (i386) and headset is Jabra BT 500v.

The first thing I upgraded was Skype itself - from 2.0.0.27 to 2.0.0.43 (built under Fedora Core 5 - isn't it about a time to upgrade?!?!).

At first I tried with the Fedora default bluez packages (version 3.20), but no luck there. Same results as before. At least this time I was just playing with it - hoping that the Fedora team had patched something.

Oh well - back to the basics. The latest version of bluez-libs and bluez-utils is 3.28, so why not give it a try. As I'm a lazy person and the archives did not include a spec file I reused the 3.20 spec files. As I'm am apt user I used "apt-get source bluez-libs bluez-utils" but somehow it is also doable in yum. This should create 2 spec files in "/usr/src/redhat/SPECS" folder. All I need to do was to copy the source archives into "/usr/src/redhat/SOURCES" folder and mod the spec files.

Bluez-libs was pretty easy to rebuild - just edited the spec file and replaced the "Version:" from 3.20 to 3.28 and ran the "rpmbuild -ba bluez-libs.spec". This created:
Wrote: /usr/src/redhat/SRPMS/bluez-libs-3.28-1.fc8.src.rpm
Wrote: /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/i386/bluez-libs-3.28-1.fc8.i386.rpm
Wrote: /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/i386/bluez-libs-devel-3.28-1.fc8.i386.rpm
Wrote: /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/i386/bluez-libs-debuginfo-3.28-1.fc8.i386.rpm

Now a little "rpm -Uvh /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/i386/bluez-libs-3.28-1.fc8.i386.rpm /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/i386/bluez-libs-devel-3.28-1.fc8.i386.rpm" and we have a newer libs in place (the devel package is needed for building the utils packages).

The bluez-utils was a bit more complicated as I had a bad experience when building the 3.20 version last time. Namely the "--enable-all" flag did NOT work at that time so just in case I modified the configure parameters. The basics are the same - replace the "Version:" string from 3.20 to 3.28 and the "Release:" string from "6%{?dist}" to "1%{?dist}". Now for the "%configure" parameters - the first thing was to replace "--disable-obex" with "--enable-obex". I'm not sure as to why it is disabled, but just in case I need obex I have it. After the obex I also added "--enable-alsa --enable-oss --enable-hal --enable-usb --enable-glib --enable-gstreamer". Now all I needed to do was a "rpmbuild -ba bluez-utils.spec" and woala:
Wrote: /usr/src/redhat/SRPMS/bluez-utils-3.28-6.fc8.src.rpm
Wrote: /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/i386/bluez-utils-3.28-6.fc8.i386.rpm
Wrote: /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/i386/bluez-utils-cups-3.28-6.fc8.i386.rpm
Wrote: /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/i386/bluez-utils-gstreamer-3.28-6.fc8.i386.rpm
Wrote: /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/i386/bluez-utils-alsa-3.28-6.fc8.i386.rpm
Wrote: /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/i386/bluez-utils-debuginfo-3.28-6.fc8.i386.rpm

Now a little "rpm -Uvh /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/i386/bluez-utils-3.28-6.fc8.i386.rpm /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/i386/bluez-utils-alsa-3.28-6.fc8.i386.rpm" and bluez should work.

So to start the bluetooth audio service I have this script headset.py:
#!/usr/bin/python
import dbus
bus = dbus.SystemBus()
manager = dbus.Interface(bus.get_object('org.bluez', '/org/bluez'), 'org.bluez.Manager')
bus_id = manager.ActivateService('audio')
audio = dbus.Interface(bus.get_object(bus_id, '/org/bluez/audio'), 'org.bluez.audio.Manager')

In theory this could be done from command line, but some time ago I found this little snippet that works for me. Basically all it does is activate and register the service as root through the dbus and it works from regular user account.

Now for the last but not the least we have to define the headset that will be used in our home folder. The file is ~/.asoundrc and mine contains the following:
pcm.bluetooth {
type bluetooth
device "00:13:17:2B:0D:11"
profile "auto"
}

where the device is the mac address of the device.

Now - to use the headset with Skype. first I run the headset.py script from console and then run Skype and BINGO - the sound starts almost the same time Skype starts. not 40 seconds later like with version 3.20. Not bad considering the connection is crypted and wireless :)
So the next step was to try the test call - and it worked without a delay!!! Last time I had to wait up to 2 minutes for Skype to initialize the output and input and thats if the connection staid up that long.

So - my headset is working and hopefully it will continue to work with Fedora 9 when it will be available and I hope it will be helpful to someone else.

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How to fix a simple Fedora 7 to Fedora 8 mess...

when doing a dist-upgrade from Fedora 7 to Fedora 8 I accidentally did a "init 3" - this is not recommended as the dkms installer runs and hangs the system as the rpm database gets locked.

The main thing is not to panic and send the machine to boot as it may not boot up and create even bigger mess...

The solution to this is simple:
first kill of any instance of rpm and rpmq
do and rm -rf /var/lib/rpm/__db.*
and rpm --rebuilddb

You can test if it worked by doing apt-get update and if it works - it will complain about allot of installed packages having duplicates but thats not really a problem (if you crashed at the beginning).

In my case it left duplicates that are obsoleted with the new release so I had to do "apt-get -f install" to fix the immediate dependence problems before I can continue with the dist-upgrade.

some could be frightened by this message
You are about to do something potentially harmful
To continue type in the phrase 'Yes, do as I say!'

well it is the reality - it is potentially dangerous to remove them so it is wise the check if the packages that will be removed have duplicates installed already (hint - removing glibc* will trash your system if you don't have a new version installed).

If you think everything is fine, well guess again - the first thing you need to do is to install new apt with its deps, do an "apt-get update" and then "apt-get upgrade". Dist upgrade is not possible as it most likely there are broke deps and file conflicts at the system right now so most like it will fail at the the end.

In my case it was at around 800 packages so I have around 800 duplicates - ARRGH. Removing them manually is possibly the wisest thing as some packages do not contain fc6/fc7/fc8 tags so you don't have a reference point what package is newer. All so some Fedora 8 packages come without the fc8 tag, so go figure...

The dist upgrade part will be next after the system gets "fixed".

Here are few scripts that "can" help:
rpm -qa | grep fc7 > /tmp/fc7packages
rpm -qa | grep fc6 >> /tmp/fc7packages

for i in `cat /tmp/fc7packages | sort | sed -e "s/-[0-9].*//" `; do echo "$i check-------------------------------------------------------"; rpm -q $i; done > /tmp/checklist


This is not an fix for a beginner, but a guide on how I did it, so use it at your own risk!

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