Hi,
In Ubuntu 12.04 Precise, after I bind a bluetooth serial device using rfcomm, I can then cat that /dev/rfcomm device, or whatever else I do please. I did have osme issues with this, but I've moved to debian so I'll forget those. I could do what I needed as a non-root user.

On Debian Squeeze, everything works perfectly (Better than Ubuntu) except that only the root user can access /dev/rfcommX. Since I don't want to go using root for everything, I need some help. Someone suggested to me that it's to do with groups, but I am still learning the dead basics here and am clueless.

Thanks
sch

Hi,

I think you need to put yourself in the dialout group. You can confirm this by looking at the ownership of /dev/rfcommX.

Evo2.

PS. I found this information in /usr/share/doc/bluez/README.Debian.gz
PPS. /usr/share/doc/<package>/README.Debian* is always the place I look when
I'm trying to configure/understand something that I think might be Debian specific.

Opps, forgot to tell you how to add yourself to a group. Here it is:

Running this as root would add the user schnappy to the dialout group.

HTH,

Evo2.

Hey,
Thanks very much! That worked perfectly. Squeeze is now behaving like Precise, as I wanted.

An issue with both though:
I want multiple programs using the serial device at once. However, when one connects, it seemingly locks out the other program - why can it only be accessed by one program? Since it's a read only device, recieving gps data, I don't see why it should be locked.

The simple solution would be to use gpsd, but that's fiddley and one of my programs doesn't support that.

Thanks

Hi,

glad I could help. I suggest that you start a new thread for your new question, and mark this thread as [SOLVED] using the thread tools menu.

Cheers,

Evo2.