Blueman
Blueman is a full featured Bluetooth manager written in GTK+.
Contents
Installation
Install either blueman or blueman-gitAUR for the development version.
Be sure to enable the Bluetooth daemon and start Blueman with blueman-applet
. A graphical settings panel can be launched with blueman-manager
.
Usage
Autostarting
The following autostart file should have been created: /etc/xdg/autostart/blueman.desktop
. This means that Blueman should be autostarted with most desktop environments without manual intervention. See the article for your desktop environment or window manager as well as the Autostarting article for further information on autostarting.
Permissions
To receive files remember to right click on the Blueman tray icon > Local Services > Transfer > File Receiving (Object Push) and tick the Accept files from trusted devices box.
To be able to manage devices, you might need to add your user to the lp
group, else you might receive the following error when connecting to a device: DBusFailedError: No such file or directory
. This is because the user needs to be authorized to communicate with the Bluetooth daemon via D-Bus - the lp
group is specified in /etc/dbus-1/system.d/bluetooth.conf
. For information on adding a user to a group, see Users and groups#Other examples of user management.
From version 2.0.6 the official documentation recommends creating polkit rules in order to avoid polkit agents asking for password on every boot, as root user add the polkit rules in /etc/polkit-1/rules.d/51-blueman.rules
with the following content
51-blueman.rules
/* Allow users in wheel group to use blueman feature requiring root without authentication */ polkit.addRule(function(action, subject) { if ((action.id == "org.blueman.network.setup" || action.id == "org.blueman.dhcp.client" || action.id == "org.blueman.rfkill.setstate" || action.id == "org.blueman.pppd.pppconnect") && subject.isInGroup("wheel")) { return polkit.Result.YES; } });
Note that user must belong to the wheel
group.
Mounting Bluetooth devices
The instructions below describe a method for using different file managers with Blueman. The examples in this section focus on Thunar. If you are using a different file manager, substitute thunar with the name of the file manager you are using.
obex_thunar.sh
#!/bin/bash [ ! -d ~/Bluetooth ] && mkdir ~/Bluetooth fusermount -u ~/Bluetooth obexfs -b $1 ~/Bluetooth thunar ~/Bluetooth
Now you will need to move the script to an appropriate location (e.g., /usr/local/bin
). After that, mark it as executable:
# chmod +x /usr/local/bin/obex_thunar.sh
The last step is to change the line in Blueman tray icon > Local Services > Transfer > Advanced to obex_thunar.sh %d
.
nautilus --browse obex://
with this one: thunar obex://
in Local Services > Transfer > Advanced
Blueman and PulseAudio
Users who want to use PulseAudio with a Bluetooth headset, in addition to installing pulseaudio-bluetooth, may want to activate the PulseAudio plugin of Blueman. This automatically loads PulseAudio Bluetooth module after audio device is connected and plays all audio through the Bluetooth headset. For more information see Bluetooth headset
Configuration
Configuration is done through dconf (or gsettings or dconf-editor) under /org/blueman
.
Disable auto power-on
Blueman automatically enables Bluetooth adapter () when certain events (on boot, laptop lid is opened, ...) occur. This can be disabled with the
auto-power-on
in org.blueman.plugins.powermanager
:
$ gsettings set org.blueman.plugins.powermanager auto-power-on false
Troubleshooting
Blueman applet does not start
If blueman-applet fails to start, try removing the entire /var/lib/bluetooth
directory and restarting the machine (or just the dbus and bluetooth services).
# rm -rf /var/lib/bluetooth $ systemctl reboot
If you see a notification saying Incoming file over Bluetooth
then this means that the device isn't marked as trusted. Mark it as trusted and try sending the file again.
No adapters detected
If your Bluetooth applet or manager doesn't show or detect any Bluetooth adapter, your wireless card may be blocked. Try un-block it using rfkill.
Can't receive files
If you can't send or receive files and you encounter a python-dbus-exception error similar or exactly like process org.bluez.obex exited with status 1
then it is advised to start the obexd-service manually from /usr/lib/bluetooth/obexd
and see if that helps. Since the default permissions assume 755 it is possible to start the daemon from a user-account and/or create an autostarter.
Should the error persist or another occur then try using ObexFTP for file transfers instead.
See also
- Blueman development, on GitHub