Saturday, September 01, 2007

Bluetooth GPS and VMWare Fusion

Yes, VMWare Fusion does indeed support mapping the MacBook Pro's built-in Bluetooth radio to a Windows VM. As this screencast movie demonstrates, once the radio has been remapped, you can use your Bluetooth devices from within the virtual machine.

Only two minor caveats for my fellow adventurers:
  • Fusion will warn you that you need to load the BootCamp drivers on the VM when you enable the Bluetooth radio for the VM. This can be safely ignored if you are using a physical BootCamp partition as a VM, but is important to keep in mind if you are using a file-based Windows VM onto which you haven't previously installed the Apple built-in Bluetooth radio's driver for Windows.
  • The COM port mappings for Bluetooth devices will be different depending on whether you've accessed the BootCamp partition physically (by rebooting and holding "Option / Alt") or as a virtual machine (from VMWare Fusion). Just be aware of this, and be sure to configure your devices before using them.

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