Ok, I'm generally a believer in "RTFM", but Bluez has almost no "M" to "RTF"!

I run a Slackware server and I want to put up a little Bluetooth PAN service on it. I'm very familiar with Linux networking and wanted to setup an easy way to get my Palm Tungsten E2 on the Internet at home (the device has Bluetooth and networking support, but no wireless 802.11 support). My idea was to setup a Bluetooth Ethernet emulation device (bnep0 I believe?), give it a private IP in a new sector, configure a second dhcpd to listen there, and configure my routing tables accordingly. Sounds easy, right?

I already have dbus up and running. I downloaded the latest bluez package from bluez.org, which is bluez-4.1.tar.gz.

I can't compile it because it insists on having glib available - from what I understand this is the Gnome graphics libraries. As this is a server, there's no GUI and I have no intention on putting X on it at all, let alone Gnome!

My experience has been all round frustrating. The documentation for Bluez is lacking at best and non-existant at worst, and I even remember seeing something on their site a while ago suggesting you read the forums - which order in the thousands of articles - and this is what they passed off as documentation!

I have read around the net and found plenty of docs on using the hcitool and other utilities, but nothing on configuring, installing and so on. That's where I'm stuck. And apparently someone is assuming everyone who wants to use bluetooth is also using a GUI???

configure --help offers no option to disable glib. the README file is very sparse and just gives you the configure/make/make install routine. the INSTALL file is the generic GNU instructions. No more documentation provided in the source tarball and on their website the FAQ has only TWO QUESTIONS - what is bluez, and, how do I get bluez!

IS there anyone out there who's actually figured this out who could give me some advice? Like I said, I do not want to run a GUI on this box and therefore I am not ok with installing X, Gnome and glib. Sorry. If that's what it takes to run this then it's not worth it and I'll just remain annoyed.

I considered trying the older Bluez versions - where the tools are separate from the core. I might give that a go, but with security the way it is I tend to always try the newest version first.

Advice??

Thanks

-FM

I think you should install glib :P
It's libglib (as dependency libc6)
and libglib-dev as dependency has only libc6-dev,libglib and pkg-config
..on my debian box
you will also need libdbus-glib-dev

..no need to install X or gnome ...just some libraries..

ddaemonunics : glib's -1.x and 2.x are part of Slackware.
And no libglib-dev on Slackware, just glib2, all in one
packages are used. ( no -dev or -devel exsists )

fmillion : glib2 is usually installed on Slackware 11.
If not, you will need it for bluez. I see no option in
'configure --help' to disable it.

I cannot read the version required, please see "configure"
from line 10508 ... Seems different from other configure
scripts.

'bluez-4.1' : 'make' errors on both Slack 10.1 an 12.
You could try the "old" stable version = 3.9 if you
can't compile either.

Mandriva has a patched version (security reason)
http://www.mandriva.com/security/adv...MDVSA-2008:145

I'd sugggest the bluez-3.9-1.1mdv2007.1.src.rpm and
bluez-utils-3.9-5.1mdv2007.1.src.rpm from
http://www.filewatcher.com/b/ftp/128...dates.0.0.html
( page 1 )

Installing with 'rpm -Uvh <package.src.rpm>
will just put a tarball and the patches in
/usr/src/rpm/SOURCES/

To be unpacked and patched and then compiled.

Regards

Well I mentioned...on my debian box.
Never used Slackware so not familiar with it