BetterBluetoothSupport

Revision 19 as of 2007-11-10 00:04:14

Clear message

MattZimmerman: this spec is far too comprehensive. it needs to be broken down into individual, achievable parts. For example, bluetooth networking via a phone should be a single spec, bluetooth file transfer another.

Summary

BetterBluetoothSupport - Usable UI tools for the bluetooth stack

Rationale

Bluetooth is becoming more and more popular among devices that people have. Many devices that people use every day such as cell phones, headsets, headphones, printers, cameras, and more are starting to utilize bluetooth technologies.

Use cases

Bluetooth device as authentication

  • Sara is very worried about people accessing her computer and is afraid of someone guessing her password when she is not in her dorm room. She wants her computer to automatically lock itself and prevent access while her Bluetooth phone that she always carries with her is not in range of the computer.BR

  • Geek's laptop is equipped with a hard drive sensor and wears his bluetooth phone on his belt. When he walks away from his laptop (the signal gets weaker then specified, not necessarily out of range), he wants his laptop's alarm system to activate and sound whenever anyone touches his computer, as Geek is very afraid someone will steal his laptop while he is getting a book in the library or going to the bathroom and doesn't take his laptop with him.

    • All of the above is possible with the tool "bluemon" available in the repositorys. If its really to hard to configure it, I could write a tutorial the next weeks. (My opinion on the above use case: DONE)

Bluetooth filetransfer

  • Dan has a bluetooth camera phone. He took some pictures and wants to share them with his friends.BR

  • Cindy has a bluetooth PDA. Cindy is heading out to work and wants to quickly bring a file with her to work without having to bend down to the computer to plug her USB stick. Cindy uses bluetooth to send the file to her cell phone.BR

Synchronization over Bluetooth

  • Mike has built up a very large network of contacts in his bluetooth phone. He wants his phone to syncronize its address book with his computer, adding everyone he has added in his computer address book to his phone and everyone in his phone to his computer address book, and also to his instant messenger list where he entered a screenname in his phone.BR

  • Jason brings his PDA with him everywhere in order to keep track of his dates. He wants to stop having to take out his PDA and struggling to enter information on the small screen when he is on his computer, and wants to be able to browse all data on the computer.BR

    • With Evolution it works okay. Kubuntu should provide the OpenSync packages for Kontact soon, so its also easily possible there. (My opinion: One big issue why people want to stay with Windows is synchronisation, altough its possible right now, the packages are not provided.)

Bluetooth devices as regular computer peripherials

  • Gary has a bluetooth headset and is tired of high cell phone bills. He wants to use it with his computer to talk to his girlfriend through a VoIP program.BR

  • Terry got bluetooth headphones from her boyfriend. She wants to use them to listen to music, but alerts should still sound through the main computer speakers, as she only wears the headphones when listening to music.BR

  • Jamie got a new bluetooth mouse and keyboard and wants to use it with her computer.BR

Mobile phone as a computer peripherial

  • Joe constantly receives text messages, and is getting annoyed at taking his bluetooth phone out of his pocket to check them, and to have to type on such a small screen to reply to them. When Joe is at his computer, he wants to send and receive his text messages through his computer.BR

  • Tim takes his laptop and his cellphone everywhere he goes. Unfortunately DSL isn't available everywhere, so he would like to use his mobile phone as a gprs modem. (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BluetoothDialup)[[BR]]

Scope

Covers usage of many bluetooth devices in common and innovative methods.

Design

Implementation

gnome-bluetooth and gnome-phone-manager help with some of the use cases.

Code

Data preservation and migration

Outstanding issues

The first part of getting bluetooth devices to work, the "pairing", is mostly broken at Ubuntu. Does noboby else encountered this? Perhaps everybody who uses it right now, is a expert. And all who want to, have given up with the conclusion "seems Linux (Ubuntu) isnt ready for bluetooth right now.

At Kubuntu (with the great KBluetooth stuff) its somewhat better, but could also be improved. But I am using Ubuntu so KBluetooth isnt the right thing for me.

BoF agenda and discussion

I have following comments. I suppose they will cover most of the remaining usecases. If so move them to implementation section.

  • Enable HIDD by default. (Mouse and Keyboard connectivity)
  • Promote multisync to main, install it by default with some sync plugins. (addressbook sync)
  • Load snd-bt-sco module by default. Provide some panel-applet to easily pair any headset. (Bluetooth headset)
  • Add some sample actions to be done using bluemon. (Locking desktop when bluetooth device moves away).

-- OnkarShinde

LunaTick: The majority of the use cases on this page could be applied to infra-red connections as well as bluetooth ones. It would be excellent if new tools were designed in such a way that an infra-red back-end could be added at a later date (or at the same time?).

  • Infrared is somewhat outdated and increasingly unused.
    • +1, I really cannot imagine when I used infrared the last time, Bluetooth is out for so long, and right now, almost no device has infrared anymore, but bluetooth.

      • But there is still merit in implementing these usecases in a modular way so they have a pluggable backend. Even if nobody uses Infrared, there's always the possibility that something will replace Bluetooth in the future, and if we make these tools in a modular way described by LunaTick, then there'll be minimal effort involved in supporting Bluetooth's hypothetical successor.

Add a program GPRS Easy Connect http://www.gprsec.hu for connecting to the internet with a mobile phones/modems PCMCIA with irda/USB/COM/Bluetooth and GPRS/EDGE/UMTS

AzraelNightwalker: We can take some ideas from Fedora's wiki: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/FeatureBluetooth

CategorySpec CategoryBluetooth