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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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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