I purchased my N800 last week, and it arrived in time for the weekend. I really enjoyed using the N800s web access around the house where I have a wireless router LAN installed on one desktop, a wireless card in another desktop upstairs.

One application I was very excited about was the possibility of being able to use the N800s native Bluetooth capability to connect to a DAW desktop. The reason I want to do this is that the wireless router and card are extremely disruptive to the SONAR 7 audio recording software I'm running on the DAW - it causes dropouts, and artifacts in the recordings, etc. So I have to disable wireless card on the DAW when I want to record. No problem there, when I'm recording, I'm not websurfing anyway.

I want to use the N800 as a wireless DAW remote controller by accessing the Windows XP desktop on the DAW via a Bluetooth connection RATHER THAN an ordinary 802.11b/g wireless connection, because I'm guessing that the Bluetooth will be much lower impact on the DAW and SONAR, and less intrusive than the wireless router/card.

My n800 came with OS2007, after a few hours of kinda clunky behavior, I said what the heck, and flashed OS2008 to my Tablet. I started getting good wireless/internet connectivity with 08, so I loaded the rDesktop 0.4 that's available on maemo.org. the install seemed to go flawlessly, and rDesktop starts right up. then, the problems. the biggest problem, once I enter all the informatin in the Connection Details form, and submit it, rDesktop shuts down. Depending on what I enter in the ConDet fields, it locks up sometimes too. What it does not do is connect.

So, here are the noob questions:

1. when you open rDesktop, is this app supposed to have a top o' screen drop-down menu available allowing access to rDesktop program components and options? Mine simply pops up with the "Connection Details" window, and looks for the fill-in information before attempting a connection. You cannot minimize this window without shutting down rDesktop. So where's the app menu? Isn't there one?

2. Since I want to use Bluetooth as my connection rather than wireless/IP, what information is rDesktop looking for in the following fields:
a.RDP server - Should I enter the PAN IP address (192.168.1.50, automatically assigned to my desktop's USB adapter by BlueSoleil bt application), or the MAC address of my desktop's USB Bluetooth adapter as RDP server? Or some other indetifier I haven't thought of? Again, since I'm not using my WLAN, it shouldn't be looking for a WLAN adress.

b.username/password/domain? Using hints from this and other boards, I established a separate user account in my DAW (Windows Xp SP2) for "Nokia N800 Tablet", with port 3389 open for RDP connections/remote desktop activated in that user profile, and permission to connect provided.

I gave this new user account its own password, and my DAW in all user accounts is a part of the same WLANetwork "Workgroup" - is my WLAN workgroup the "domain" that RDP is looking for? This would be strange to me, because I'm not using the wireless network for n800 access to my DAW - I'm using bt. It would seem to me more logical to enter the nickname given to my bt PAN as the "domain" . . . yes?

Dear god, I'm looking at this post, and what a mess I got. i thought this was going to be simple, and no, I'm not a linux developer - although if I figure out the hacks on how to remotely run SONAR 7 on my Windows desktop from my n800 via bt rather than WLAN, I'll write up a whitepaper on it, and post it here so everyone can see how its done (cropssing my fingers).

BTW, I checked the SONAR 7 board, and there were a number of posts back in late '05, early '06 about people using a variety of devices - via their LANs, VNC Client and other methods (BUT NOT BLUETOOTH) for accessing the windows desktop remotely with some sort of handheld/smartphone, etc. None lately, and NONE specific to rDesktop, or the n800 (or even the n770).

Oh yeah, another noob question - this may be easier.

Is there some preferred suite of 3rd party maemo-deb Linux and/or Nokia apps that I will HAVE TO HAVE installed on my n800 (i.e., that rDesktop is expecting to have running in the background) before I have a prayer of getting this to work?

For example, do I need a version of Python installed EITHER as a dependency for rDesktop, or in order to allow me to do some basic editing/coding to hack a solution to the bt mystery? If so, which one?

and finally - since I'm struggling so with this, is it possible that all my apps and hardware are working properly, but the nokia has a significant problem, either mechanically, or some corruption that's preventing rDesktop from working properly?

I appreciate any assistance from the community - feeling pretty lost, but I'm extremely hopeful that we can get this figured out, primarily because the n800 seems to have a very broad flexibility for interconnecting with a variety of networks using a variety of vectors. I'm hoping to be able to exploit the flexibility in order to get my n800 to do what I want it to do . . .

thanks again - Noob Chris

No, there isn't; the blank white window behind the dialog is just for show, essentially. After you fill in the details (and supposing it can connect), another window (fullscreen, always-on-top) takes over, and the RDP session is in there.

[/quote]2. Since I want to use Bluetooth as my connection rather than wireless/IP, what information is rDesktop looking for in the following fields:
a.RDP server - Should I enter the PAN IP address (192.168.1.50, automatically assigned to my desktop's USB adapter by BlueSoleil bt application), or the MAC address of my desktop's USB Bluetooth adapter as RDP server? Or some other indetifier I haven't thought of? Again, since I'm not using my WLAN, it shouldn't be looking for a WLAN adress.[/quote]You say BT instead of wireless/IP; understand that IP is necessary for RDP, and BT is in fact wireless, so that's not especially meaningful I haven't used PAN, but if that's what you're using, you need both machines on the same PAN and seeing each other. Then the IP on the computer for the PAN connection is indeed what you need, but I'm only 99% sure... I use the fqdn; I don't think this strips the hostname for auth purposes, but it might.

I don't really know the significance of all this; the domain especially. The user and password are the obvious, same as you would use to log in at the console. The new username, and whatever password you set, should be fine, though I'd have used my existing account.
(Oh, and I hate usernames with strange characters; they cause unpredictable problems from apps that (brokenly) misunderstand them. If you ever make a new new user, name it something like "n800"; all lowercase, no spaces, increases the chance of sliding past any brokenness.)
My computer is on a direct internet connection, so I've got a fqdn. I use the network name (i.e. fqdn less hostname), and it works. I'm using local password authentication, no domain or workgroup relevance.

Oh, why am I writing all this... I'll test stuff.

OK, no domain needed here; leave it blank. (I think it filled mine in by stripping the hostname of the fqdn.) IP address works fine instead of fqdn.

So, assuming local auth, fill in IP for the server address, fill in username and password, and leave Domain blank.
We got VNCviewer, ya know. It is more stable than the GUI version of rdesktop you're using. There's a CLI version called rdesk around; you have to run it from xterm with command line arguments instead of filling in that initial dialog. But it is said to work consistently. The GUI one works perhaps one in three tries; changing some option (check/uncheck memory cards) seems to improve chances.
(None of that helps you get IP over BT of whatever form, of course. Until you can ping one machine from the other, it really doesn't matter what protocol you plan to use.)

There are no unhandled dependencies -- the underlying Debian package system sees to that.
For the BT side of things... you may need to install maemo-pan to get PAN support, if you haven't already. My inclination would be to use SPP (should be easy, I think), and run SLIP over that; but PAN might (I really don't know) be somehow better.

For whatever basic edit/code/hacking, shell scripts are all you should need, unless you get some compulsively-indenting monkey to do the hacking for you in python.There's the instability of the GUI rdesktop, of course, as I mentioned above, but almost certainly no faults/corruption peculiar to your machine.

Benson - killer response, friend. That gave me a lot of food for thought, and should kick me another yard or two in the right direction, if not all the way home. I'll let y'all know how it goes. I'm a very eager student, and willing to experiment some to make this work as I think the end result will transform my project recording studio into a more user-friendly domain, so to speak.

I'm just excited that the sky seems to be the limit with the n800 - like, so what do you want to do with it? Well, then you can go right out and do it, man!

I'm also excited that the n800 is more powerful in every category of performance than my first Pentium machine in '98. I've been waiting for a wireless tablet with these kinds of resources for 10 years . . .

Peace - PD

OK - Bit of an update on using rdesktop on the n800.

I was finally able to determine what rdesktop was looking for in filling in the access screen form:

1. IP address of desktop
2. user account for desktop
3. user pwd for desktop
4. domain = your local ISP access user id@your isp provider.com (THIS LAST ITEM WAS TRICKY, AND NOT NECESSARILY INTUITIVE)

I accessed my windows XP desktop through rdesktop, and I was able to start up my SONAR 7 recording software, and obtained full control of video and audio - from the n800, I opened up a SONAR 7 audio recording project, used the SONAR transport controls (by pressing onscreen buttons with my stylus) to start and stop playback on a pre-recorded project.

So it works, at least by accessing the desktop using my WLAN connection.

Now, the next step for me is how to access via a bluetooth connection - does anyone have any ideas about how to configure the rdesktop access for bluetooth, with my WLAN connection disabled?

My desktop's bluetooth adapter shows a IP address of 192.168.50.1 - what do I use for "domain" of my bluetooth PAN? I think that may be all I'm lacking . . .

Any help would be appreciated . . .

PD

With a PAN connection, I don't think you need anything in domain; basically, if the devices are on the same network, or the bridges/firewalls between them are sufficiently transparent, that's not needed at all. Have you tried that?

Looks like remote recording transport control should be happening for you within the next day or so. From our conversation a week or so back it sounded like you had a working PAN between the desktop system and the N800. You're close at this point!