Bluetooth fixes for Easy

The package that provides core bluetooth support is 'bluez', and GUI management is provided in Easy Pyro by 'BluePup' and in Easy Buster by 'Blueman'.

BluePup is a GUI manager that I developed in 2016, that uses the 'bluetoothctl' CLI utility, GUI provided by 'gtkdialog'. I haven't done any work on it since 2016.

Blueman is a sophisticated GUI written in Python3. It is in the Debian repository. It has many dependencies, which is why I haven't used it in Pyro -- but BluePup works OK, although very basic.

This has been a long time coming, but I have finally fixed Easy so that the Bluetooth management icon does not appear in the system tray if there is no bluetooth hardware on the motherboard.

The situation up to now, is that the icon appears, like right now running Buster 2.1.8 on my HP desktop PC, with a little "x" on the icon to show it is disabled. But really, we don't want the icon to be there at all.

BluePup has /root/Startup/bluepup_tray, that now checks for existence of /sys/class/bluetooth/hci0 and if not exist, will not launch the tray applet. Ditto, Blueman has /root/Startup/blueman_tray, which now has the same check.

I tested detection and pairing of my bluetooth mouse, on both Pyro and Buster, and success, but in both cases the mouse did not work after a reboot. I had to turn the mouse power off then on again, and it worked.

But then I discovered, all that is necessary is to click one of the mouse buttons. Moving the mouse does not do it. That's OK, I can live with that.

One thing that is essential, which was already in Buster but not in Pyro, is that /etc/bluetooth/main.conf needs this in it:

[Policy]
AutoEnable=true

...apparently, this replaces a udev rule that runs "hciconfig hci0 up".

My mouse is working consistently in both Pyro and Buster, not dropping out. 

Tags: easy