I had enough of this and this morning I went to a local electronic dealer and bought a “SpeedLink VIAS NANO BLUETOOTH® USB Adapter”. There was a Mac logo on this package, so I thought: Ok – for 15€ worth a try.

Back home, I opened the Mac Pro, removed the CPU tray and the popped out the BT cable to this little tiny daughterboard. I used the chance to install the 32GB OCZ SSD that I had removed from the Mac mini “Belldandy” a few days ago (and had placed an Intel 80GB SSD into it) as 2nd “Optical Bay” drive. Usage of this small storage? Well – Scratch Photoshop loves scratch drives and I thought it makes more sense to use it for this than having it laying around in the rack.

When this was done, I simply put the small “NANO” USB stick into the side USB bay of my HP screen.

I know that “sleep” could become a bit of a problem, but since my Mac Pro always decides to wake up in the middle of the night, I normally turn it off completely. So that’s not an issue.

When booting into Snow Leopard the first time, it presented me a windows with the information that no mouse, trackpad nor keyboard was found. Ok – sure! They were still bond to the internal BT stuff which is now disconnected. After turning off & on the Magic Mouse and removing and putting back in the batteries of the keyboard, everything worked flawlessly! I’m very surprised how fast this little Magic Mouse could be and just now notice how bad the connection must have been before. Very surprising, because of the huge antenna, but well – this issue is now solved for a very good price

PS. For the Planet Debian users: I have now installed an RSS Plugin that should resize all photos to a width of 300px. I hope this works!

[Update: Keyboard issues]
If you’re willing to reset & re-pair your BT keyboard everytime you reboot your machine, don’t worry. But if you tend to shut down your Mac Pro every evening (like I do) – be warned. I couldn’t find a way to connect to my BT keyboard automatically. The weird thing is: The Magic Mouse & Magic Trackpad are working great – no need to re-pair them to the USB-BT-Stick. As I don’t care that much and luckily had a small USB keyboard laying around, I stopped looking for a solution after 1h, attached the USB keyboard and done with this issue – but it’s strange, that this USB-BT-stick works fine with the pointing devices but not with the keyboard.

I’ve also seen this happening sometimes on my iMac 27″ back in the mid of last year (before it was trade in for the Mac Pro) and also my wifes iMac i3 21.5″ sometimes had this issues – means: you have to remove the batteries, put them back in and re-pair the connection between the Macs BlueTooth and the BT keyboard. (Btw. revision of all our keyboard are A1314).

I’ve chosen the (in my mind) best way to be able to use the “wake up” function and cheapest way. A good USB stick drives you easily to 20-30€. So I bought a cable (UFP to RP-SMA) and a huge RP-SMA antenna from WLAN-Box. They delivered the next day! (WOW!).

I then drilled a 6.5mm hole into a backplate and put in the UFP to RP-SMA cable, fixed it and mounted the external antenna. Next, I installed it into the Mac Pro. For this procedure I had to remove the graphics card and the CPU & RAM tray. I had to remove the original antenna UFP cable and attached the new one which I routed behind the alu frame. Pretty easy

Here are (on request by @theinsanecow) photos of the result.

So far, it works great Bought a new wireless keyboard yesterday and use the Magic Mouse that came with the Mac Pro.

Here’s the tray inside くるみ

Behind the tray is the only issue I have so far with her – BlueTooth is a pain in the ass since the early Mac Pros and Apple hasn’t fixed it so far. When attaching the (ironically) delivered Magic Mouse to the BlueTooth device, movements are bucking. Very annoying. But I was aware of it, since my “2009″ Mac Pro (Bruno) also had this issue. I thought the only way to fix it was to uncabel the BT card use a USB BT stick. Ivor just showed me another, better, way in his comment yesterday. Here’s a link to what I will do, too. I will go with the version of attaching a huge WiFi antenna, build into a bracket and connect it via UFL to RP-SMA to the BT card.

Pros:

• Costs about 1/2 of a good USB BT Stick
• Allows me to use the sleep mode. USB BT Stick would not

As mentioned before, I’m using 3x 1TB HDs, 1x WD Caviar Black and 2x Hitachi (RAID1) for Video.

I’ve put the boot SSD (OCZ Agility 2 E 240GB into the top space (ports 5 & 6) just below the “SuperDrive”. Need to find a fitting frame

And here an impression of くるみ sitting on my desk – beautiful

Will keep you updated on the BlueTooth Antennagate

UPDATE
I had received the antenna + cable on Friday but since I was on a family visit in Eastern Germany over the weekend, I was just able to “build” this BlueTooth-boost antenna this morning. What I should say? It was pretty easy and my Magic Mouse works fabolous! I will get a new wirless keyboard in the evening and then I’m back with wireless Apple devices on my Mac Pro

Many many thanks to nobblynoel for the fantastic tutorial!

UPDATE 2
And just another update. Remember the Mini DisplayPort to DisplayPort cables I’d ordered with the 3x screens? Well, they never arrived via Hermes so far. Because of that, I had ordered 2 cables (again!) from kab24.de – a very fast and great online shop. Ordered on Friday, received on Saturday by a neighbor (we were gone because of a wedding over the weekend). Just got this package from my neighbor. THAT is fast delivery!

So here’s a screenshot of all 3 screens connected and how it looks alike in the system information

Now I just have to wait for the delivery of the metal bracket to fix the SSD in a good manner into the Mac Pro cage – then I’m done. So – really done

So we went to the re:Store in the CentrO. Oberhausen and bought 3 fancy things:

The already mentioned (pretty expensive in my mind) MiniDisplayPort to Dual Link DVI adapter to be able to connect my MacBook to the 30″ Cinema HD display, a Magic Mouse (yey!) and a BT wireless keyboard (wohooo!).

For my surprise, when I moved the stuff out of the bag, I saw that the sales guy has NOT booked the keyboard, but the VESA adapter for the Cinema display I was asking for (too bad, it will not fit to my new LX arm from Ergotron, because it’s too heavy). As result of this wrong scanning, I’ve saved 40 Euros + 5 Euro shorting on my request

More soon!

Ciao
Dennis