Bluetooth dongle test?

[no.to...@gmail.com]

Previously I bought a Win7-netbook, just because I wrongly
believed that my wireless-phone could not be driven from linux.

Few people know *HOW* devices work [in terms of voltage transitions
that you can see with an oscilloscope] they just know: klikA,klikB,klikC
'worked for me'. Let's analyse this from an electrical engineer's view:

The dongle's LED flashes every 2 secs.
`lsusb` detects the <bluetooth dongle>

But apparently one of the 'ealiest blueTooth' commands :
`hcitool scan` shows "Device is not available".

The last 2 modules loaded: shown first in `lsmod`
are <bluetooth>

The dongle must have a USB-layer and a bluetooth-layer:
clearly the USB-layer is communicating with the PC.

What is a primitive test to confirm that the bluetooth-layer
communicates with the USB-layer?

The newest entries in /dev/ are like:
"-usbdev3.78_ep81"
which I think were created each time I plugged the dongle.

So I'm guessing that `hcitool` should communicate with
one of the 13 "-usbdev3.*", but `hcitool scan` shown
<no device>.

One reason why my linux couldn't drive my wireless-phone
was that it needed /dev/modem to be linked to /dev/ttyUSB0.

I can do a 'kind of hardware probe' for the wireless-phone
in that `cat /dev/ttyUSB0` == <no such>, unless plugged,
and then, it waits until I unplug. That confirms a lot and
a similar test for the dongle would too.

HOW2 read/write the bluetooth-dongle at a low-level?

Is it a character device or a block device?

Are USB character or block devices?

== TIA