I have a pretty new installation of debian squeeze on my Asus eeePC 1101HA netbook. The netbook AFAIK has no bluetooth card, but does have a wifi card for going out on the internet.
My goal for this post is to set up a bluetooth dongle serial port connection to take readings via a python program from a voltmeter with a serial port. I had this working some time back on an old laptop running WinXP and bluesoleil, but that laptop died
. I acquired this netbook a little over a year ago, and the WinXP/bluesoleil config would not start, but I wanted to be over on linux anyways. Given my experiences on the old laptop with Ubuntu (bluez) and on this netbook with Puppeee Linux, I have migrated to debian (which I eventually wanted to arrive at anyways), and am attempting to set up now. I think I am almost there...
Using Blueman, it wasn't long before I got the USB/bluetooth dongle paired up and connected with the bluetooth serial dongle
, which I had never managed reliably on a linux distro before using bluez (or whatever). Blueman gave me the port as /dev/rfcomm0. I thought I was ready to rock 'n roll, but unfortunately when I pointed my python program at this port, I got a stack dump with a "permission denied" message
.
Searching around for awhile on linuxquestions, I concluded I will need to modify the /etc/bluetooth/rfcomm.conf file (mine is totally commented out). Permissions are 644 on the file, but I believe it is the directives inside that count. Am I barking up the right tree, or is it something else going on? I've never worked with this rfcomm.conf file, so I'll need help or a tutorial, plus I'll be looking at the linuxquestions threads I found.
Something else I found, although it may require a separate posting, is that I've noticed on both debian and puppeee that if I plug in the bluetooth usb dongle, I can no longer access the internet over the wifi card - I have to reboot. I haven't checked this out on the WinXP os. Don't know if this is related - probably separate issue.
Thanks in advance for any help.
