5.1. Turning on the Bluetooth Radio

To enable the Bluetooth radio on the Palm handheld, we'll need to go into the Prefs->Bluetooth applet on the Palm, and set the following values:

Figure 5-1. Select Bluetooth from your standard Prefs applet on the Palm

In order to set up the connection, we need to give it a name. I've given mine the name of 'MyPalm' as shown in the screenshot below. This identifies your Bluetooth connection to other hosts which you will be sharing data with; your desktop in this case.

Figure 5-2. Naming your Bluetooth device connection

Now we have to turn on the Bluetooth radio in our Palm device. Do this by selecting "On" in the Bluetooth dropdown at the top, as shown below.

Figure 5-3. Overview of the properly-configured Bluetooth settings

At this point, we want to leave the Palm device set to "Discoverable", but disallow "Allow Wakeup". What this means, is that your Palm can be seen (discovered) by other Bluetooth devices within range. Once we are sure that the desktop can see the Palm, we can disable this as a security measure, but for now, we'll leave it enabled to aid our debugging at the beginning.

The "Allow Wakeup" option allows other devices within range to "wake up" this device, if it was asleep, and communicate with it. Imagine the implications if you had your Palm in your pocket or briefcase, and another maliscious person nearby was able to "wake up" your Palm from their Bluetooth device and communicate with it. Bad mojo. The less information about your device you can give a potential attacker, the better.

Leave Wakeup disabled, unless you specifically know you need it enabled!