Bluetooth is of course a well-known mechanism for connecting mobile phones and pda’s to computers and laptops. It is low-power, easy to setup, and works out of the box on most systems. Until recently setting up serial over bluetooth in ubuntu/debian wasn’t a trivial task. I was by all means doable, but for many people meant creating and copying, downloading and tailoring some command-line scripts. This difficulty is mostly still noticeable when looking at the sheer amount of blogposts and articles and wiki’s about this setup. The tools are there (bluez has been in development for years) and work great, but setup is not for Joe / Jane Average.

When I revisited using my mobile phone’s GPRS modem on my netbook via bluetooth (an Acer Aspire One, running Ubuntu Intrepid, 8.10), I found hundreds of articles detailing the aforementioned edits… and a couple about achieving the same with a gui. The sysadmin-side of me prefers console solutions as these can be used over ssh (so I can set this up for others), my advocate-, user-and blogging-sides wanted a gui.

I found Blueman (http://blueman-project.org/). I first read about it last november (at version 0.6) and was impressed, at time of this writing it is now at 1.02 and working even easier than before, thumbs up!

In this article I’ll have a look at setting up Blueman “the easy ubuntu way”, i.e. mostly from a gui, with package signatures and without using a terminal (I will have to cheat though ).
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