Bluetooth on PCBSD 1.3

I just installed brand new Altec Lansing surround sound speakers (for my laptop they are just 2.1 channel over 5.1 channel capable system… but whatever… they sound good!) and I was wondering if I could be lazy and listen to some music, especially change tracks and volume as I lay in the bed.

So finally I decided to get bluetooth running on this machine. It’s a Compaq Presario M2000 range laptop with AMD64 Turion (I’m stuck with 32 bits because of PCBSD… but that’s another story). So this is what I did…

Most importantly, it is imperative that any PCBSD (and that ultimately means FreeBSD) user must read through the FreeBSD Handbook before experimenting.

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/network-bluetooth.html

I installed the required application (obexapp) as given and tried the commands. Most of them seemed to fail but the ping worked. Then I remembered reading something at the bottom of the handbook page - a command to disable role switching. Used that and now things seem like they would probably work!

Kudos to the maintainers of the software and the handbook for keeping things simple enough. However, I’m hoping we do get some automagic/ point-and-click functionality for this too… because typing in more than 3 commands scares any casual user. And yes… PCBSD is bringing a lot more casual users than FreeBSD might have expected, so no more procrastination!

Keep rocking *BSD!