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VMWare Fusion, Bluetooth, and Windows GPS software Laptop Macs
Although the options are growing, the Mac market for GPS navigation software with GPS and turn-by-turn directions is far less mature than the market for such solutions in Windows. With VMWare Fusion's support for linking your MacBook or MacBook Pro's Bluetooth radio to a Windows virtual machine (including your Boot Camp partition running as a virtual machine (VM)), you can use your Bluetooth GPS receiver with Windows navigation software.

All you have to do to enable the Bluetooth support in a VM is find the appropriate USB icon for the built-in Bluetooth radio in the VMWare window frame, and activate it on the VM. The icon will turn blue to let you know that that the Bluetooth radio is now linked to the VM. I posted a quick demo of Streets & Trips detecting and using a Bluetooth GPS receiver in a VMWare session on my blog.
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VMWare Fusion, Bluetooth, and Windows GPS software
Authored by: gm80 on Sep 05, '07 07:53:17AM

The way to do this back in the VirtualPC days was to configure a Mac serial port for the Bluetooth device, under System Preferences -> Bluetooth -> Devices -> Edit Serial Ports.

Then all you had to do was "connect" the specific serial port to the Virtual PC, rather than the entire Bluetooth adapter. Most GPS software natively understands a serial-connected device, and it looks like a wired device to the PC, with Mac OS handling the Bluetooth-serial translation.

Not sure if it still works with the newer virtualized solutions for Intel, though.



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VMWare Fusion, Bluetooth, and Windows GPS software
Authored by: müzso on Sep 06, '07 10:04:14AM

You should keep in mind that you've to install the BootCamp drivers pack into the virtual machine (even if you do not use BootCamp itself for dual booting!), because Windows (neither XP, nor Vista or any other verson) does not contain the driver for the Mac's bluetooth adapter.

I've successfully used Nokia PC Suite this way in a virtual machine through a bluetooth connection between the program and the mobile.



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