I have a Palm TX and would like to have it connect to my Slackware box so I can pull files from it and also browse the Web from the Palm device.

- I have a USB class 1 bluetooth dongle in the PC.

- The PC is running Slackware 10.2.

- I installed BlueZ, bluez-utils, bluez-libs, bluez-sdp, bluez-pan and kbluetooth in the PC.

- I have these lines in my /etc/rc.d/rc.local file:

--------------------------------
# enable hci device
hciconfig hci0 up
# start hci daemon
hcid
# enable forwarding
echo 1 >/proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward
# nat all traffic leaving via eth0
iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE
# start sdp daemon
sdpd
# announce LAN service
sdptool add LAN
# bind rfcomm
rfcomm bind 0 01:02:03:60:C2:4B 1
--------------------------------

That is enough for me to accomplish the following:

- Find the PC as a "nearby device" and pair the Palm device with BlueZ (although kbluetooth shows no paired devices whatsoever in Control Center).

- Issue commands from the PC that make the Palm device bleep like R2D2, e.g. 'sdptool browse 01:02:03:66:C0:2B' or 'hcitool scan'.

- "Browse" some place in the Palm device and sloooooooowly send files to it through OBEX. That is possible thanks to kbluetooth and its GUI tools.

Summing up, the PC has no trouble finding the Palm device. My problem is exactly the other way around, that is, have the Palm device find the PC. Not the bluetooth dongle. The PC, its network and environment. I want to do this:

- Have the Palm request and get a connection to the PC.

- Browse any folder in the PC from the Palm device and pull files instead of telling the PC to send them to the Palm device.

- Use the PC's connection to the Internet (e.g. download mail) with the Palm device.

I have been able to accomplish these things in Windows 98 with the help of this program running on Windows:

http : //
w w w
.mochasoft.dk
/freeware/ppp.htm

(The forum won't let me post URLs because I am new here.)

It has to be kept running so Palm can use it. I think it creates some sort of "dial-up" service that lets Palm connect to the PC. Or something like that. I admit I do not understand the process, I am pulling hair out about this already. I really have no idea WHY THIS HAS TO BE SO INCREDIBLY DIFFICULT on Linux.

On Linux, there is no way I can make it work. Whenever I try, I get this infamous error message:

Error: Serial: timeout. Could be bad cable or faulty modem. (0x0305)

Of course I looked for that message and found plenty of people with a similar problem. But I can't seem to find the magical solution. I've read at least two dozen explanations, recipes, tricks, how-tos, opinions, assumptions, whispers and surefire approaches that simply do not work. I guess that maybe I might have understood well enough that I need to create this USB-thru-serial-to-network bridge somewhere somehow, but it seems that ALL documents I have found in Google and linuxquestions.org itself will not tell me exactly how to do that. Actually, I even suspect that they BALK at the problem. They all hide details from that very last step in such a consistent pattern that I can't help the suspicion that this is indeed an arcane procedure that very few people in the world really understand. I feel that they explain the part they really know and just hope that the reader will figure out the rest themselves out of some amazing lucky strike. I have not been so lucky over the last six days, I am REALLY tired of trying and would really appreciate it if someone who really understands the problem could give me a clear explanation of what needs to be done to get this last step covered on a Slackware machine.

Please.

Thank you for your attention, at the very least.