14 October 2011 by Lars

Oh well, Fedora or SUSE? Shortcomings abound… and one bluetooth solution.

So I put openSUSE 11.4 onto the X220T yesterday (10 minutes), then proceeded to try and get the other things into working order:

multi-touch screen
bluetooth
Gnome 2 or 3

Multi-touch screen

Followed instructions/suggestions from some post on the openSUSE wiki to

Upgrade to newer Xorg server (Fedora runs 7.5-1.10, stock 11.4 runs 7.6-1.9, butÂ http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/X11:/XOrg/openSUSE_11.4/Â provides 7.6-1.10)
Upgrade to newer kernel (Fedora runs 2.40 which is 3.0 according to some, so I went withÂ http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/Kernel:/stable/standard/)

I verified that upgrading just the Xorg server did not solve the problem (multi-touch not recognized), but doing both solved the problem. Yey!

Bluetooth

Paired with my phone, and sent a file. After having configured Bluetooth to actually allow receipt of files (in Gnome 2, under settings – in Fedora 15/Gnome 3 nowhere to be found!), it worked. Note that the bug I was running into on Fedora 15 was repeated and unending PIN pairings, so just the upload settings can’t really have been the only problem.

On to other things… OOPS!

And so I thought I was done, installed a couple of other things, and then closed the lid to put it into sleep mode. Oh wait, the light is still blinking.

Well, it looks like with the 3.0 kernel, sleep wasn’t working. At all. That’s pretty major dealbreaker….

So… back go Fedora 15

I learned at least some things: back in Fedora 15, I looked through the available packages for anything bluetooth-related. And found ‘blueman’, which I had used before, before Bluetooth settings got so well integrated into (SUSE’s) Bluetooth settings. And lo and behold, I paired with the phone, and easily got the sending of files to work. SOLUTION FOUND.

sudo yum install blueman

Preliminary conclusion

They all have problems… the join of all the distributions would be an awesome operating system… Each one on its own is only part of it…

#bluetooth #fedora #openSUSE