On Sun, Nov 22, 2009 at 11:59:30AM -0800, John Jason Jordan wrote:
> I think bluetooth in testing is seriously broken. The same thing
> happened when I installed testing the first time a month ago.

In my experienece, Bluetooth in Debian (the "unstable" branch, at
least) works just fine.  It's the GUI tools that are really lousy,
when they're available at all.

> If I click on the bluetooth icon in the Gnome panel and then on Setup
> New Device a window is supposed to pop up with Forward/Back buttons to
> step you through finding the device and pairing it. But when I click on
> Setup New Device nothing happens. I suspect there is a missing package,
> but it seems strange that no one else on the Debian user list seems to
> have a problem with bluetooth.

I gave up on trying to figure out why there appears to be no common
way for a dialog box to pop up and ask you for a PIN. Just write the
PIN the device wants to see to the appropriate file in
/var/lib/bluetooth. For each bluetooth radio connected to your PC
(there's probably only one), there will be a corresponding directory
in /var/lib/bluetooth, named with the address of the device, e.g.:

# ll /var/lib/bluetooth/
total 4.0K
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4.0K Dec 26  2008 01:02:03:0A:0B:0C/

Inside that directory, there may or may not be a file named
"pincodes". It's easy enough to create. On each line, there should be
the Bluetooth address of the remote device you wish to pair with,
followed by whitespace, and then the PIN code you want your PC to send
to it, e.g.:

# cat /var/lib/bluetooth/01\:02\:03\:0A\:0B\:0C/pincodes 
01:23:45:AB:CD:EF 0000

The next time you initiate a connection to the remove device, if it
demands a PIN from your PC, the PIN you specify in that file will get
sent. This accomplishes the same thing as having a dialog box pop up
asking you to type the PIN in yourself.


-- 
Paul
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