Tungsten Bluetooth implementation flawed
by Volker Weber
Today I played around with Clyde, the Tungsten T, in order to connect it to my network via Bluetooth. I do not have a BT access point, which seem to be ridiculously expensive compared to WLAN gear. Thus I needed to resort to Lucy or Bert.
The BT stack in Mac OS X does not include a LAN Access Profile so you need to set up PPPD (PPP Daemon) to talk to the BT Modem. That is a bit tricky but fortunately there are scripts that make this really easy.
However I really wanted to have Clyde connect to Bert since that machine runs 24x7 and never goes to sleep. The BT stack there is much more complete and it also includes the LAN Access Profile. So I paired Clyde with Bert, set up a connection and finally a network on top of that. Easy enough. I can test the connection from preferences just fine. Connect and disconnect.
But wait: As soon as I start using an applicaton, Clyde "dials" the connection and then bombs right away. Soft reset. Absolutely predictable each and every time. WTF is this? I dug around on the internet where I found numerous accounts of the same problem. It is not mentioned on Palm's useless support site. So, I am not holding my breath for a quick fix.
Interestingly enough the Palm M515 with the BT SIO card does not seem to be affected. Puhleeeeze, get this fixed now.
