planetILUG

Join the
ILUG
on FaceBook

Join the
ILUG
on LinkedIn

Join the
ILUG SETI
Group

Linux and Bluetooth Headset howto (AKA: Fedora, BTSCO, Bluez, Jabra and Skype)

By John G. Moylan

We use Skype a lot in our household. We use it for ringing friends and family, both here in Ireland and also in China. We also use it for all of our POTS terminated calls. So far, it is the only cross platform VOIP application that I have found to work easily on both Linux and Windows, and to have localized Chinese and English versions. It also has excellent sound quality.
So, after becoming the proud owner of a brand new Dell X1 laptop, I just had try out Linux's Bluetooth Alsa support.
The procedure is quite straight forward:

Requirments

• Install the bluetooth support (Bluez)

  yum install bluez-libs bluez-pin bluez-utils bluez-hcidump bluez-utils-cup

• Install Alsa, with the devel packages
  yum install alsa-tools alsa-lib alsa-utils alsa-lib-devel

• Install automake

  yum install automake

• Ensure that you are using a 2.6* kernel and that you have the emu10k1 module (Sound blaster Live) compiled (you don't need to load it or anything - and FC4 should have it as part of their standard Kernel RPM by default anyway. )

My headset is a Jabra BT200, you can pick these up quite cheaply on Ebay.. I did. I purchased the Jabra because I knew that it is supported by BTSCO - there is a list of support headset available at http://bluetooth-alsa.sourceforge.net/.

Pairing your Headset with your PC:

This took me a while to figure out, Gnome's bluetooth interface is pretty useless at present. And the KDE interface is not included with FC4. The command line procedure is pretty straight forward though.

• Ensure that bluetooth is up and running on your PC

  hcitool dev should return the MAC address of your bluetooth device in the form:
  Devices:
  hci0 11:11:11:11:11:11

• Put your headset into pairing mode
• Scan for your headset by running
• hcitool scan - this will return the MAC and name of your headset device.
• Connect to the headset using:

  hcitool cc MACofHeadset

   hcid.conf

        options {
        autoinit yes;
        security user;
        pairing multi;
        # PIN helper
        pin_helper /etc/bluetooth/feed-pin.sh;
        # D-Bus PIN helper
        #dbus_pin_helper;
        }

        device {
        name "%h-%d";
        # Local device class
        class 0x120104;
        # Inquiry and Page scan
        iscan enable; pscan enable;
        lm accept;
        lp rswitch,hold,sniff,park;
        # Authentication and Encryption (Security Mode 3)
        auth enable;
        encrypt enable;
        }

     rfcomm.conf

         rfcomm0 {
         # Automatically bind the device at startup
         bind no;

         # Bluetooth address of the device
         device 11:11:11:11:11:11;

         # RFCOMM channel for the connection
         channel 1;

         # Description of the connection
         comment "Bluetooth Device
         }

#!/bin/sh
echo "PIN:0000"

The feed pin script should have the pin number for your headset.

Installing and using BTSCO:

Once the device is paired the next step is to download and install BTSCO, I installed from CVS:

• Check btsco out from cvs:

  cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sf.net:/cvsroot/bluetooth-alsa log
  cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sf.net:/cvsroot/bluetooth-alsa co btsco

• Compile:

  ./bootstrap
  ./configure
  make
  make install
  make maintainer-clean

• Build the kernel module:

  cd kernel
  make
  make install
  depmod -e
  make clean

• Load the module

  modprobe snd-bt-sco

• Connect btsco to your headset

  btsco -v MACofHeadset

Your Headset should now appear as an extra audio device in Skype's options. You may want to add a script for starting skype with BTSCO to your $PATH

    #!/bin/sh
    btsco MACofHeadset
    skype

USERS COMMENTS

Posted By Joerg Baach 19:43, 5 May 2007

Great. Googled for hints on how to use my samsung wep200 together with my x31 (debian), found this, and it worked like a charm! Thanks a lot.