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I recently purchased a new Apple Wireless Bluetooth Keyboard for use with MythTV. The choice of input device for MythTV is a very subjective thing to be sure, but I love this device because its as small as it can be without feeling cramped, its thin, light weight, and stylish.

Setting the device up to work with Debian Etch is fairly straightforward once you know what to do

Obviously, you need a motherboard with built-in Bluetooth or a USB Bluetooth receiver. Once you have that, lets install the software you’ll need:

Now we need to figure out the Bluetooth address of the keyboard:

Now that you have the Bluetooth address of the keyboard, lets modify the following lines in /etc/default/bluetooth:

Next you’ll add a new section to /etc/bluetooth/hcid.conf for the keyboard:

At this point you can pair the keyboard. Since I use fluxbox on my MythTV frontend computers I manually start the required applets, etc.

1. Start window manager
2. As the logged in user, run “bluetooth-applet”
3. Power cycle the Bluetooth keyboard
4. As root, execute “hidd –connect $(keyboard addr)
5. Type a PIN number on bluetooth keyboard (i.e. 1234) then hit return
6. The bluetooth applet will start flashing in the window manager.
7. Click the bluetooth applet and enter the same PIN in the dialog that pops up

That should be it. You now have a working wireless keyboard :-)

If anyone knows of a way to do this entirely on the command line, bypassing the window manager and bluetooth-applet entirely, I’d love to hear it.

Enjoy!

This entry was posted on Friday, September 26th, 2008 at 7:29 am and is filed under Debian, Hardware, HowTo, MythTV. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.