Keyboard - how?

[Iain Hibbert]

On Sun, 27 Dec 2009, M. Warner Losh wrote:

> In message: <1261935364.501662.751.nullmailer at galant.ukfsn.org>
>             Iain Hibbert <plunky at rya-online.net> writes:
> : - IMO the PIN should be ephemeral and use-once so when you are paired you
> :   should remove it from the config file or at least comment it out
>
> The whole pairing thing is kind of ugly atm in FreeBSD.  I used big
> hammers, I think, to make it work.  In other OSes, I just see what is
> discoverable, click a couple of times, maybe enter a PIN and I then
> promptly forget about it until I have to 'unpair'.

I have had complaints about it in NetBSD too and while I think I improved
on Max's start it still needs further work and should be graphical. I'm
not sure about the whole dbus thing that BlueZ is moving to now though it
does work well as you say with the GNOME application. I thought about
working something lightweight up with (eg) tcl/tk but haven't got around
to it yet..

> : > Now, I guess the next step would be to find the bt mouse I have and
> : > try to get it going as well...
> :
> : that is probably fixed pin 0000 if not in the documentation
>
> Yes, it is :)  The default is to no pin, so it wasn't authenticating.

Some devices that I noticed will only enforce the auth on making or
accepting the connection. Even the Linux stack used to do this (on the
accept path only) but I think they fixed it now.

> : > This is my second favorite keyboard ever.
> :
> : How is the keypress feel?  I've not had a go on one of those, but I have
> : an original apple bluetooth keyboard (white with clear undershell, full
> : sized with num keypad) that works well though a smaller one might be
> : interesting.
>
> It is ok.  Not as good as the happy hacking keyboard, but certainly
> nice enough to use.  Better than most to my feel, but ymmv.

I will have to take a trip to the Apple store as it looks a bit rubbery, I
want to play with a magic mouse too and I saw that they had some of them
last week. (it will not be easy to support properly, I have seen some
connection logs and it does some private internal feature back and forth
conversation first - we thought that probably enables the touch pad
feature which might not be too hard to do, but the driver must then
interpret all the swipes itself)

> btw, is there some way I can easily list the paired devices?

'easily' not really, but /var/db/hcsecd.keys should contain keys for all
paired devices. Actually, there can be more keys stored in the device
itself (if you paired with another OS that might happen or you can do it
manually). I think you can check/change/remove those with hccontrol but
must edit the hcsecd.keys file manually.

iain