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"In short, it has no easy way to connect to the Internet at all. In order to get the thing to connect to the Internet, I had to fucking emulate a Dial-up Modem

"In short, it has no easy way to connect to the Internet at all. In order to get the thing to connect to the Internet, I had to fucking emulate a Dial-up Modem over Bluetooth using a Raspberry Pi." I was more impressed by the author getting this to work than the entire article about Google maps backwards compatibility. That dedication ._.

dfox 9y ago
It is not that hard to setup using bluez if you know that you want the modem emulation mode (ie. DUN) and not the native ethernet over bluetooth mode (PAN or BNEP). Probably biggest issue is getting the pairing to work without some kind of desktop environment (modern bluez expect dbus service that handles the UI). In 00's this was the way to connect palm devices to internet wirelessly, there even were ready made "bluetooth accesspoints" that did exactly that.
- jimmies 9y ago
  I wish I knew that piece of information before wasting hours just to figure out I had to use the DUN profile instead of PAN/BNEP. After another half a day I decided that there was no chance I could understand bluez system in the Raspberry Pi to make it provide DUN via the USB Bluetooth dongle. So I thought to configure my HC0x Bluetooth dongle to provide DUN via serial tty. So I went the alternative route of hacking the HC06 Bluetooth module to HC05 (or the other way around) because I only had the wrong kind laying around. I needed to wire 30 wires from the desktop parallel port to the dongle to reprogram it. And had to install Windows XP 32 bit on the desktop because the firmware programmer only likes that. It took days to get the Palm to connect to the Internet. It was a crazy journey & deserves a long blog post by itself :)
  - dfox 9y ago
    I just wrote post to facebook about the only time I had seen BNEP working at all (and in the most complex configuration possibly and on top of that reliably), also something worth of series of blog posts (I'm somewhat fuzzy on why exactly we built that, I remember clearly that there was some bussiness reason for spending whole day on that, which either means that there was some real problem that got solved by that or it was just part of qualification test for Thinkpad T60). In my experience whether the dongle is connected through USB or as native UART is mostly immaterial from the bluez PoV. Another thing is that when we started playing with this disconnecting USB BT dongle reliably caused deadlock in kernel (on linux 2.4.25 or something like that, about half a year before first realy usable 2.5.x kernels)

dfox 9y ago

It is not that hard to setup using bluez if you know that you want the modem emulation mode (ie. DUN) and not the native ethernet over bluetooth mode (PAN or BNEP). Probably biggest issue is getting the pairing to work without some kind of desktop environment (modern bluez expect dbus service that handles the UI). In 00's this was the way to connect palm devices to internet wirelessly, there even were ready made "bluetooth accesspoints" that did exactly that.

jimmies 9y ago
I wish I knew that piece of information before wasting hours just to figure out I had to use the DUN profile instead of PAN/BNEP. After another half a day I decided that there was no chance I could understand bluez system in the Raspberry Pi to make it provide DUN via the USB Bluetooth dongle. So I thought to configure my HC0x Bluetooth dongle to provide DUN via serial tty. So I went the alternative route of hacking the HC06 Bluetooth module to HC05 (or the other way around) because I only had the wrong kind laying around. I needed to wire 30 wires from the desktop parallel port to the dongle to reprogram it. And had to install Windows XP 32 bit on the desktop because the firmware programmer only likes that. It took days to get the Palm to connect to the Internet. It was a crazy journey & deserves a long blog post by itself :)
- dfox 9y ago
  I just wrote post to facebook about the only time I had seen BNEP working at all (and in the most complex configuration possibly and on top of that reliably), also something worth of series of blog posts (I'm somewhat fuzzy on why exactly we built that, I remember clearly that there was some bussiness reason for spending whole day on that, which either means that there was some real problem that got solved by that or it was just part of qualification test for Thinkpad T60). In my experience whether the dongle is connected through USB or as native UART is mostly immaterial from the bluez PoV. Another thing is that when we started playing with this disconnecting USB BT dongle reliably caused deadlock in kernel (on linux 2.4.25 or something like that, about half a year before first realy usable 2.5.x kernels)