On 07/07/2017 10:54 PM, Leslie Turriff wrote:
That's okay. This is my first experience with BlueTooth; it seems to be the only way to share a keyboard and mouse between two systems. I guess I expected that the support for such an "old" technology would be quite stable (silly me). One of the things that bugs me is the dearth of real documentation on these systems. (I have to admit that I've been totally spoiled by my thirty years in the mainframe environment, where the hardcopy documentation for just the components of the OS fills a moderately sized room, with separate volumes for installation, configuration, operation, tuning, and debugging; just the system messages and codes manual takes up four thick volumes.) I am continually confounded on one hand by sketchy man pages, and on the other by some that are so complex (e.g. sudo) as to be effectively useless, all couched in terminology seemingly intended to obscure rather than inform.
Hah! When I started with NASA in 89 (I was an AE before an ATTY), we still used mainframes, BICs, etc. for flight design and to start and run both the fixed-base and motion-base simulators in Building 5. I'm not sure about spoiled. When they died, they died, and somebody way smarter on mainframes hand to breath life back into them :) (and the phone would start ringing off the hook if you kicked off an SVDS run before normal quitting time -- it would bring the whole system to a crawl. If I recall correctly it was about 750,000 lines of FORTRAN, common-blocks, yuk!)
This BlueTooth stuff is a case in point. How can someone attempting to configure a BlueTooth device be expected to know that the pertinent tool is called hciconfig? For that matter, looking at the tools provided by the bluez package, there is also one called hcitool. As usual, the man pages for these provide little in the way of helpful info.
Thank God the glic man pages are bullet-proof works of art. Now the individual packages like hcitool, etc. many times rely on just the package developer to put the pages together -- we all know how much priority documentation gets in our own projects. <snip>
An example from the hciconfig man file "explaining" one of its parameters is
voice [voice] With no voice, prints voice setting. Otherwise, sets voice set- ting to voice. voice is a 16-bit hex number describing the voice setting.
There is no explanation of what voice does, and no description of the allowed values for this option or their meanings. This is typical of the content of most man files.
I guess the developer expects us to reference the source-code for a complete understanding - even then, depending on comments in the code and his coding style, it can be a challenge.
It does look as if hciconfig might be more useful than hcitool; or perhaps there is a real distinction between 'devices' and 'connections'. Of course, these man pages don't describe how (or if) they complement one another. And there are a handful of other tools in the package that I'll have to examine. Of course, /usr/share/doc/packages/bluez is a waste of time; one wonders why anyone bothers with it... :-( On my ancient PPC Mac (which I keep solely to run an obsolete version of a package whose vendor is apparently afraid of Linux users), as soon as I powered it on, OS-X detected the presence of my new keyboard and ran a wizard to connect. I can understand that Linux doesn't install the software for a particular device if it is not present during installation, and I don't mind that it is configured via a CLI, but why does it have to be so obscurant?
The whole bluetooth thing is somewhat black box to me. I've never really used it other than on small devices that were intended for its use (e.g. wireless phone earbuds, etc.) Then the device handles the pairing process fairly easily. Here are a few more links that look relevant: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/96693/connect-to-a-bluetooth-device... https://wiki.debian.org/BluetoothUser https://help.ubuntu.com/stable/ubuntu-help/bluetooth-connect-device.html This reminds me of setting of a PXE-boot server. There was a 'smattering' of pages (some with old, some with new, some with bewildering) information. Think of yourself is a pioneer (or prospector) of bluetooth knowledge. Once you strike gold, you will be a prime candidate to update (or write) the suse bluetooth howto. -- David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-kde3+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-kde3+owner@opensuse.org