Bluetooth Hell - Bluetooth Salvation (?)

Okay as some of you may know I bought a bluetooth headset a while ago, and rarely use it because you look like a tit wearing one in a car, and like a right loony if you walk around with one, however I have adequately long hair to conceal one now and will be depending on my bicycle as my main form of transport from this Saturday the 22^nd of September onwards, so I will probably use it.

I digress…I’ve been trying to get it to work on my computer for the past couple of months without success, the trouble started when back when I was using Arch linux (insert link) and upgraded to a testing version of the distro which broke distro-specific btsco package, what do I do as the resourceful little villain that I am? I obviously set about compiling it, which didn’t work, so frustated I gave up on it until I picked it up again not too long ago.

Having finished my stint of work (I’d have blogged about it but it was mind numbingly dull) I had little else to do than playing around with my kernel, reading and watching random things, this naturally led to trying to get the blasted bluetooth working.

So I get the btsco source, and as usual the stupid thing didn’t compile yet again, I searched around and found this link, which describes that one needed to patch the kernel, rejoicing I patched the kernel and as if by magic it now compiles!

I was really excited at that point, so imagine how I felt when I type in the magical sommand of modprobe snd-bt-sco and it doesn’t load, an absolutely earth shattering experience when bored and sleep deprived while listening to The Smiths…

So after some more searching I finally find the following link, which describes that it contains an error in the source, which is fixed after simply editing one single line of code, something even someone like me whose C programming skills extend to writing a program which outputs “Goats are better than Moose” over and over while triggering the system bell.

So after recompiling, the kernel module now loads, and my bluetooth works perfectly albeit untested due to the incompetency of my friends for not picking up their phones and wasting my SIP credit.

In conclusion, even though getting certain things to work in Linux can be rather painful even after years of experience, like everything in life if you stick with it, it will eventually work with a bit of luck and research.

I’d like to thank Christian Mager and the Gentoo Forums for having the answer I needed at exactly the right time, I also took the liberty of uploading the patch to my site which can be found here in case someone needs it right away.