This is a rought-draft page that I'm making to take some notes on how I got the Debian Gnome Bluetooth support to work this time around. Bluez and its supporting utilities are an endless source of frustration and perhaps even of nightmare, so it's probably a good idea to have some notes…
There's about a million and ten Bluetooth-related packages in Debian. Most of them are legacy, but are not properly conflicted and do not remove themselves sufficiently when uninstalled. After some initial bad experiences, I started by removing with purge every Bluetoothy package I could find, and then installing unstable versions of the following packages:
Then I ran /etc/init.d/bluetooth stop and then start as root.
I soon found that my terrible little bluetooth dongle needed to be in my room, not the adjacent room two feet away, so I moved it.
I ran blueman by going to System->Preferences->Bluetooth_Manager in the Gnome menu. It is very pretty, but very hard to use. I set my dongle to be always visible using Adapter->Preferences, and set the name to something friendly.
I then tried the pairing with my T-Mobile G1 from both ends. Trying to pair from the G1 end made the device appear in the blueman list, but failed because I don't know what PIN blueman expects by default, and don't know how to set it. So I instead selected the device in blueman and clicked its pairing button near the top. This gave me a dialog that let me type a PIN code, which I then got to type at the G1. All of this had to be done reasonably quickly to work. After some number of tries, the G1 randomly paired with the blueman-managed adapter.
Once the devices were paired, I could verify this by right-clicking the G1 in blueman and saying "Refresh Services", which caused blueman to connect to the device temporarily. Connecting to the G1 as an OBEX browser didn't work, even with Nautilus installed; turns out G1 has no OBEX support by default. So I installed Medieval Software's free G1 OBEX app from the Android Marketplace. It seems to be working fine.
However, I still can't get Nautilus to browse the phone, and I'm seeing indications no one else can either. Looks like a bug in current Gnome VFS bits somehow. Why does Gnome have its own VFS stuff? These packages may solve the problem, but I haven't gotten the energy to try installing them yet. I may try a command-line tool next.
So now my next goal is to sync my wife's phone, a Nokia 7510, over Bluetooth to my Linux box. I will probably end up just giving up and buying a USB cable.
I hate Bluetooth, and I hate Bluetooth on Linux even more. Having these adventures always reminds me. (B)