I admit to being in my mid 70s and am not as good a researcher as I once was but am having trouble finding documentation on this issue. If anyone can point me in the right direction it would be appreciated. I've programmed in slackware Linux environments for more than 20 years, but seem to forget stuff almost as quickly as I learn it. My main machines run slackware 14.2 with bluez 5.40
their /etc/bluetooth contain:
input.conf main.conf network.conf proximity.conf serial.conf
I have a couple older laptops running slackware 14.1 with bluez 4.99
their /etc/bluetooth/ contain:
audio.conf input.conf main.conf network.conf proximity.conf rfcomm.conf serial.conf
In slackware 14.1 the rfcomm.conf has some commented out examples which are helpful but I'd like to know more about the syntax for these *.conf files for both systems.
1) is rfcomm.conf depreciated in slackware 14.2 or can it still be used to setup device defaults?
2) I have two different ELM327 bluetooth auto diagnostic devices I want to test separately at different times with slackware 14.1 using /dev/rfcomm0. Can I have two different rfcomm0 entries in my rfcomm.conf file each with unique mac addresses for device and have 'rfcomm connect' recognize the appropriate device via this mac address and connect it on rfcomm0?
I have read a lot of different forum articles about establishing bluetooth rfcomm connections. It gets confusing as things changed with bluez version 5 and above switching 'hcid' to the new primary console control program 'bluetoothctl' which is used to configure things in Slackware 14.2. My current interest is using slackware 14.1 to test these ELM327 as I have to use the laptop so I can get it close enough to the car to access the device via bluetooth. A complicating factor is my laptops lcd screen's bottom two lines of text do not display in console so its very difficult to use at the console level. I have to start Xwin and use its command prompt window. The bluetooth ELM327 I recently purchased requires a pin to connect. If
I try 'rfcomm connect' with the appropriate mac address a popup window appears briefly saying a pin is required, but I am not prompted for
the pin, and after the popup window the connection fails. The clearest forum article I found about this is
https://jehrhardt.github.io/blog/201...-debian-linux/ where the author uses 'bluetooth-agent' as the pin helper. Have also seen this mentioned as 'blue-simple-agent' in other posts. It appears to be a python shell script, but I can't find it on my laptop system, nor in the slackware-14.1 package bluez-4.99-i486-3.txz. Frustrating.
I did finally get this device connected using the Xwin slackware 14.1 blueman utility which had already been installed on the laptop. It has an 'add device' option and if enter the ELM327 mac address for device in this window it recognizes that a pin is required and prompts for it and is able to connect. I believe it will now continue to connect to this device in future as it saves the information for the device. However I would like to know why I can't find the console simple-agent or equivalent and how one is supposed to do this from the command line without Xwin in slackware 14.1. I've read that in slackware 14.2 using bluetoothctl and issuing 'agent-on = yes' will enable its pin helper, but am unable to test this as can't get
my Tower system close enough to the car to see the device.
