Sane bluetooth keyboard setup for lightweight Linux desktop?

07
2014-07
  • asveikau

    I have a pretty light Debian unstable setup, just xdm and a window manager, no fancy desktop environments or Ubuntu-whatever that a lot of guides seem geared towards.

    I'm trying to switch to a bluetooth keyboard. I have it so that when I run this it works:

    $ hidd --connect <address>

    The first issue is I can't really type this when the system boots and xdm starts. (Sure I could solve that with an init script, but the next issue comes into play...) The other issue is that if I lose pairing (say the thing goes into power-saving mode), I need to re-run the above command.

    How do I get it so that it pairs and re-pairs without any intervention? On Windows with the same hardware I can pull out the keyboard randomly, type a key to wake it up, and it just pairs. Then it goes to sleep, no big deal, it comes back on and is paired. What do I need to get this behavior on Linux? A lot of stuff steers towards bluez-simple-agent but even when I get that working it still needs manual setup and running hidd.

    • Answers
  • asveikau

    Well that was weird. Looking into what people said about hidd online, I tried using the -i option, I found that one of the daemons started by /etc/init.d/bluetooth was hogging the socket that hidd --server might have otherwise used. Specifically I got:

    # hidd -i hci0 --server
Can't listen on HID control channel: Address already in use

    So strangely the following in /etc/rc.local does mostly what I wanted so far:

    /etc/init.d/bluetooth stop
hidd -i hci0 --server

    Kind of a crazy hack and I might prefer some other solution...


    • Related Question

    Apple keyboard pairing over Bluetooth
  • jfmessier

    Does the Apple keyboard require 8 digits to pair, or could i pair with, say, 4 digits, as the usual cell phones and other Bluetooth device ?


    • Related Answers
  • caliban

    It really depends on the BT software on the desktop. For example, when I pair my Windows machine with my Apple BT alu-keyboard, it requires 6 characters, not 8.

    I've heard of people pairing it with BT Nokia cellphones, WM devices, etc - so it should not be a problem or a limitation set by Apple AFAIK.

  • Jonik

    If pairing with a Mac OS X system, yeah, it's 8 digits.

  • jfmessier

    It has been found that the Apple keyboard can work with different number of digits. The issue is that until an Apple keyboard is somehow initialized by a MAC and given an identity, it cannot remain connected under linux. I do not know whether this a Linux Issue, or this is an unnamed keyboard issue, but since the keyboard was given a name under MacOSX, it connects fine under Windows and Linux.