Hello community...
after some long, intense struggles with the materia I have come to the point, that I need some help...

Here the facts:
Got some nice USB Bluetooth dongles (2 from Acer, some of Widcomm under a no-name label)... so far, so good... both will be found as USB Devices. But, the Widcomm ones won't be supported by any known driver, bad luck... the Acer buddies are listed in the BlueZ and affix stacks. Fine. I installed first BlueZ, because the kernel from 2.4.20 will have the bluez mod inside. Won't work. Then I got the info, that the kernel mod inside 2.4.20 is too old. OK, then I patched the kernel to the actual bluez version. Device found, module loads, hciconfig can't create any device... OK, I thought, try affix. Now I killed all bluez and installed all affix stuff. Still no go. The Devices will be found and that's it. No protocoll or device will be bound to this found devices.

Has anyone an idea what I can try now? I'm puzzled to bones...

Regards linux folk,
LiWiz

Puzzle solved!
I got the new 2.4.21 kernel with Mandrake 9.1 and magic, magic ... everything works, not only bluez module will be loaded, also hcid and sdpd will load and a hcitool dev shows my USB Devices. And more than that: Surprisingly both work, the expected Acer as well as the freecontrol USB dongle gives me a working Bluetooth connection. PAN works perfect. I'm happy as can be.
And now I'm looking forward to get my hands on a DSL-router with bluetooth (like the AVM device)... keeps making it fun! ;-)