Monday, December 28, 2009

Bluetooth with the Lenovo S10-2 and UNR 9.10

Recently a reader, kl2u or sharkl2u, wrote a comment on my blog on using UNR 9.10 on the Lenovo S10-2 netbook concerning Bluetooth with UNR 9.10 on the S10-2 - he could not get it to work. I never had a need to try out Bluetooth on my netbook so far and the reason for this is that, at the moment, I have only one Bluetooth device in my possession - my trusty Nokia 5320 XpressMusic hand phone (or as some people call it, mobile phone). Just out of curiosity, I decided to see if I can use Bluetooth to connect my Nokia 5320 to my S10-2 netbook.

The first problem that I had to overcome was enabling Bluetooth on the S10-2 netbook under UNR 9.10. Simply put, THIS CANNOT BE DONE. The keyboard combination of Fn+F5 refuse to work with UNR 9.10. Finally I had to remove the hard disk containing UNR 9.10 and re-install my original Windows XP hard disk into the netbook. Then I started Windows XP and used the Fn+F5 combination to enable Bluetooth. After this was done, I had to remove the Windows XP hard disk and re-install my UNR 9.10 hard disk into the netbook. This may sound ridiculous but it is the only way I could get Bluetooth enabled on the Lenovo S10-2. If any readers out there could give me an alternative solution, please tell me. By the way, once Bluetooth has been enabled, the only way to disable it (and you need to do so if battery life has to be conserved) is to use the physical switch on the right side of the netbook. Note that using this switch to disable Bluetooth will also disable the wireless - it is impossible to enable or disable Bluetooth or wireless separately (a poor design on Lenovo's part IMHO).

After the UNR 9.10 hard disk had been re-installed, I started the netbook and I was delighted to note that a Bluetooth icon now appears on the taskbar - indicating that Bluetooth is now part of UNR 9.10 - unlike UNR 9.04 where you had to manually install the required drivers and stacks. All I had to do to connect to my Nokia is to right-click on the Bluetooth icon and select "Add new devices..." Following the screen prompts, the netbook managed to find my Nokia. After entering the key given by the netbook's procedure on the Nokia, I was then connected! I could then send files back and forth to/from my Nokia and the netbook. It was simple and straightforward really. The only thing I miss is the PC-Suite software from Nokia (that only works with Windows) which allowed me to do a lot of things which are not available with the simple file transfer capabilities with UNR 9.10. Now if Nokia can come up with a Linux version of their PC-Suite....