[ALUG] Blue tooth

[MJ Ray]

Simon Elliott <alug at sionide.net> wrote:
> As far as I can tell, the default behaviour of Bluetooth on Ubuntu is to 
> display a little Bluetooth icon in the notification area, which serves 
> no other purpose than to notify me that I have Bluetooth hardware and to 
> let me change a couple of useless settings.. By default it appears 
> possible only to receive file transfers from another device, but not to 
> send stuff. Why leave it out? If you've bothered to buy a bluetooth 
> dongle then this is exactly the sort of functionality you do need!

Why?  You might be just sync'ing with the phone's PIM or you might be
just using a bluetooth device as a network gateway or you might just
be pulling files off it from the computer.  Running an easy-to-use
visible Bluetooth recipient is a (minor, limited-range) security risk.
I use sobexsrv only because my phone is a bit old and not very cool
and some stuff can only be copied off it by phone-triggered transfers.

That's not to excuse Ubuntu's cryptic error messages.  It really ought
to warn you that some needed software is not installed.

I don't really understand why GNOME and KDE have invented their own
ways of doing this.  Why can't they leave the computer-driven send and
receive to openobex and the obexfs filesystem?

Puzzled,
-- 
MJ Ray (slef)
Webmaster for hire, statistician and online shop builder for a small
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