Bluetooth dongles - which ones work?

[Iain Hibbert]

On Sat, 19 Dec 2009, Eitan Adler wrote:

> I'm looking to get a bluetooth dongle that will work with freeBSD. I
> have heard from various places that bluetooth dongle support is
> hit-or-miss. Can anyone provide any advice as to (a) which ones are
> likely to work and (b) anything I should be looking for regarding the
> specs of the device?

Which places told you that?  I think in fact all USB devices should work
just fine as they conform to a published standard..

the specs you will see are "v2.0 + EDR" or even "v2.1 + EDR" and I doubt
there are many 3.0 devices available as yet..  later spec is naturally
better, but the FreeBSD stack doesn't support some of the extra features
(eg Secure Simple Pairing) though that won't often be a problem anyway.

You also see a "Class" value that relates to the strength of the radio and
the distance of transmission (100m, 10m, 1m), a normal device would be
Class 2 (10m range)

iain