Linux Bluetooth vs. Vista Bluetooth
Recently, the cord on my extremely uncool (but functional) pair of headphone have started to bother me. After a near miss on my usual bus, I found myself wandering the isles of our friendly neighborhood Fry’s Electronics. I found myself a nice set of Bluetooth headphones to go with my phone. They work like a charm.
As I was sitting at my computer the other night, I thought that it would be a good idea to get myself a Bluetooth adapter for my computer so I could use my new wireless headset with some of my games, and of course, Skype. Again, I found myself wandering the isles of Fry’s Electronics, and found a nice, cheap little Belkin adapter that would barely be noticeable attached to my computer.
After my purchase, I realized that I was in a great position to do a little head to head comparison of how Bluetooth would work in Windows vs. Linux. My computer dual boots Vista and Ubuntu 10.04.
I started with Vista.
The process was pretty normal, with one little hiccup that I don’t consider a deal breaker. After opening the case, I was informed that the disk didn’t have a Vista driver, and they pointed me to the website. I click a few links, a 200MB+ download, and the driver is in my possession. Run the Setup.exe file, and it installs all the software that I’d ever need to use the Bluetooth headset. Sure enough, connects first try. No fuss no muss. Other than the driver glitch, not a bad process.
On to Ubuntu.
I was a little nervous about this as I’d never done this before, and there was no mention of anything about Linux in the little dinky book that came with my little Bluetooth adapter. I figured the process might be similar. Find me a nice little driver out on the website, download, install, done. After firing up Ubuntu, I was in for a pleasant surprise. There was already a Bluetooth icon in my upper panel. The first thought that crossed my mind was “that can’t be it.” I was wrong. That was it. I clicked on it and connected to my headset first try. No installs. No software downloads. No setups. It’s just there.
The funny thing is, people say that Linux is hard.
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