UPDATE #1: The latest portage now has a 3.x version of these tools. If you update to the latest portage as of 2009-03-05 then you likely won’t have to jump through these hoops.

I was trying to do some fun stuff with my Wii remote on Linux today and found that when I went to build the BlueZ utils on my Gentoo box it failed almost straight away.

To save you the headache and I did some digging. I have a quick and dirty way to fix your Gentoo setup if you’re experiencing this problem.

If you care it’s related to GCC 4.x handling includes in C in a different way than previous versions. If you don’t care just ignore the previous sentence. Here’s the fix:

Step 1: emerge bluez-libs. When the emerge gets into the configure stage, press Control-Z to suspend the build. The configure stage is when it spits out lots of “Checking for …” messages.

Step 2: Edit the /var/tmp/portage/net-wireless/bluez-libs-2.25/work/bluez-libs-2.25/src/hci.c file with your favorite editor. Within the chunk of includes you see at the top of the file add the line “#include ”.

Step 3: Run “fg” to continue the build. bluez-libs should emerge normally now.

Step 4: emerge bluez-utils. When the emerge gets into the configure stage, press Control-Z to suspend the build.

Step 5: Edit all of the following files and again add the line “#include ” to them. The files are: net-wireless/bluez-utils-2.25-r1/work/bluez-utils-2.25/tools/hciconfig.c, net-wireless/bluez-utils-2.25-r1/work/bluez-utils-2.25/tools/hciattach.c, net-wireless/bluez-utils-2.25-r1/work/bluez-utils-2.25/sdpd/request.c, net-wireless/bluez-utils-2.25-r1/work/bluez-utils-2.25/hidd/sdp.c

Step 6: Run “fg” to continue the build. bluez-utils should emerge normally now.