New Gnome Bluetooth configuration utility

[Fredrik Noring <noring nocrew org>]

Hi config people!

I'd like to announce the availability of a Gnome Bluetooth
configuration tool (with screenshots):

   http://noring.nocrew.org/bluetooth/

Fedora already ships a system service called "hcid", as part of
the Linux Bluez packages. This Gnome tool makes it possible to
configure basic Bluetooth device properties like status, name and
pairing through this hcid.

The actual Gnome tool part is very simple, because it's just a GUI
glued on a DBus connection to hcid. It's currently written in C
because I couldn't get the Python DBus library to work properly.

The main work and important configuration improvements are made in 
hcid. Changes include:

  1. A hcid DBus interface for Bluetooth device management
     as well as device configuration management, key pair
     management etc.

  2. Plain text files for configuration storage. The current
     hcid shipped with Fedora uses for example the binary file
     /etc/bluetooth/link_key for paired keys. This file is
     based on a binary dump of a struct and as such will be
     difficult to move accross different architectures,
     compilers etc. This binary file is automatically converted
     to a plain text file located in /etc/bluetooth/keytab if 
     this file does not already exists.

  3. A device name cache for paried devices, making it possible
     to display the names of paired devices.

  4. Persistant storage of configurations, by saving changes in
     /etc/bluetooth/hcid.conf, managed automatically by hcid.

  5. A man page (hcid.1).

These changes are not included in the main hcid branch yet. I think 
more testing and some technical discussions/improvements on for example 
the DBus interface are needed before this can happen.

Comments? Any interest?

(Specific lists for discussing Bluez and Gnome Bluetooth in general
are <bluez-devel lists sf net> and <gnome-bluetooth usefulinc com>.)

Fredrik