Bluetooth Stack for Karmic
What alternatives are available upstream?
Blueprint information
- Status:
- Complete
- Approver:
- Martin Pitt
- Priority:
- Medium
- Drafter:
- Alexander Sack
- Direction:
- Needs approval
- Assignee:
- Tony Espy
- Definition:
- Approved
- Series goal:
- Accepted for karmic
- Implementation:
-
Implemented
- Milestone target:
- None
- Started by
- Rick Spencer
- Completed by
- Alexander Sack
Whiteboard
asac: this was finished at the end of karmic and was forgotten to set to implemented.
NB: Note that Karmic will be using GNOME-BLUETOOTH by default.
desperately needed as bluetooth is broken since intrepid for many users especially using bluetooth dongle.
jaunty ruined the situation more.
Ubuntu should switch to the gnome-bluetooth fork: http://
tgpraveen: yeah we definitely should. fedora 11 already has it. could someone post what was discussed at uds? there is no gobby document for this
pmarti: The session was cancelled without previous notice
robbie.w: The main issue we have in Ubuntu is the lack of someone willing to own/drive development in the bluetooth stack. Until we can find this person(s), I think bluetooth will continue to suffer.
superm1: I think combined with the issue with no one to own/drive the stack, you have a root problem that upstream isn't using a bug tracker at all. If there is no tracker to forward bugs, there are really only two solutions I see:
1) You can get someone driving it is if they are actively working on it and understand all the code well enough to produce the patches themselves from the Ubuntu bugs.
2) You'd have to tell everyone who has a bug to go subscribe to <email address hidden> and ask them to try to work directly with upstream on their particular issue.
TheMuso: This is unfortunate news, as I was really hoping to push a good audio bluetooth experience this cycle with PulseAudio. How much work is involved in getting things in a usable state for bluetooth?
asac: obexd will be required for gnome-bluetooth 2.27.6; added a obexd/obex-
jerone: It seems that an unknown (yet seemly well developed) bluetooth project known as blueman has a lot of what we are looking for: http://
1) Has network manager integration
* Does work.
2) Has pulse audio integration
* Does not appear to be functional. The key features this would have brought was "just works"
1) headphone support (a2dp)
2) headset support
ulissesf: With pulseaudio 0.9.15 and bluez 4.40 we already have pulseaudio integration. When the new gnome-bluetooth connects to a headset the bluetooth-discover module in pulseaudio adds the appropriate sink/source.
From what I saw until now blueman seems to have a good centralized UI for most bluetooth related tasks. The support for connecting to 3G/EDGE/GPRS is also good (through ModemManager?). I can see gnome-bluetooth being able to do all of this but I don't really know upstream's plan, Bastien? Maybe the two projects can talk in order to avoid duplicated work? As an example just this week Bastien added simple pairing support to gnome-bluetooth. This is a really good feature to have but does blueman have support for this?
Krzysztof Kosiński: what about this set of use cases?
1. Dial-up networking over a phone with an RFCOMM interface (most older phones have this)
2. Networking using a phone with PAN interface (all Windows Mobile devices, for example)
3. Sharing a network connection over a Bluetooth link between two computers
4. BT keyboards and mice; IMPORTANT: they should work at the login screen after reboot!
5. Audio output to A2DP compliant headphones
6. Audio recording from headsets
7. Browsing the contents of a mobile phone's memory (OBEX-FTP)
8. Sending and receiving files via Bluetooth (OBEX push and receive)
For 1-3, there is supposedly a plugin in gnome-bluetooth for NetworkManager; it's not present in the current alpha (Alpha 4). No idea about 4 - I haven't used any BT input devices yet. 5 and 6 should work with recent PulseAudio. 7 works. 8 works for the send part, receive requires gnome-user-share.
===
Work items:
Write QA testplan for main use-cases: TODO
Send out call for testing based on the QA testplan after Feature Freeze (forums, mailing list, blog): TODO
Collect feedback and open bugs: DONE
[asac] Compare blueman vs. gnome-bluetooth - call for testing: DONE
[asac] investigate/
decide whether to use gnome-bluetooth or blueman in karmic: DONE
MIR blueman/
Add blueman/
demote bluez-gnome to universe: DONE
ensure that dist-upgrades to karmic automatically get new bluetooth UI: DONE
update spec "implementation" section to reflect what was actually implemented: TODO
