Bluetooth in Linux

This is a tutorial to enlighten you about how to use Bluetooth in Linux. Bluetooth is a short distance communication standard. The most common bluetooth stack used in Linux is BlueZ. BlueZ was originally developed by Qualcom and later made OpenSource. Since version 2.4.6 it is included in the Linux kernel distribution. So the first thing you have to do is install BlueZ on your Linux box. Just do a google search for bluez and install it on your system. You can get BlueZ from http://bluez.sourceforge.net

Once you are done with this, the next step is to start the bluetooth service. This can be done manually by the following command -

sh /etc/init.d/bluetooth start

VLC Player

I decided to watch a coupla dvdrips i had on my hard disk and was sick and tired of the messages like “cannot find codec” or “unable to play file”. That’s when i came across the VideoLAN Client player or the VLC player as it’s known as now. This player is very popular and it’s popularity has go to do with the fact that it does not use the system’s shared codecs but instead has it’s own set of codecs. Best of all it’s free and the fun doesnt end there. It is available for almost all platforms, so i managed to get it working on my linux box. If you have many divx xvid files and videos, this player is a must for you. Get it at http://www.videolan.org/

VLC (initially VideoLAN Client) is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, …) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network.