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newsBlueman replaces BluePup in Easy Excalibur
Have posted recently about the new woofQ2, building with Debian's APT, and creating Easy Excalibur (Excalibur is Devuan's equivalence to Debian Trixie).
EasyOS has, since 2016, had BluePup, which is a GUI wrapper around the 'bluetoothctl' CLI utility available in the 'bluez' package. I also created 'bluepup_tray', a tray applet that displays if Bluetooth is active or not, and clicking on it launches BluePup. Wrote about BluePup a few times in this blog, see this one:
- BluePup bluetooth manager has returned — October 26, 2020
Testing BluePup in the latest build of Easy Exclibur, it doesn't work. Yes, I get the GUI, but there is something wrong with rendering of the embedded VTE terminal window. I can get something to render in it, but it is not properly updating.
Maybe it can be fixed, but it got me wondering about
alternatives. The problem is, I rarely work on BluePup; yeah, that
blog post from 2020 would be about the last time I worked on it.
Bluetooth is tricky, and the manager-GUI needs to be an active
project, with ongoing contributions.
So, I tested Blueman, and paired my little Bluetooth speaker, no problem. This is the good thing about having built Easy Excalibur from the ground-up with APT; everything is installed correctly and the total environment is compatible. I just ran "apt install blueman" and then ran "blueman-manager".
Blueman has critics over the years, good reports and bad. But, most important, a very active project:
https://github.com/blueman-project/blueman
...last commit 13 hours ago; that's what I like to see!
Apparently Blueman includes a tray applet, but I haven't used that, have kept pluepup_tray; instead, when click on it, runs blueman-manager.
Blueman; that's one less thing for me to worry about.
Note, if anyone wants to discuss woofQ2, Easy Excalibur and Blueman, there is a thread in the Puppy Forum:
https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?t=14632
I see that don570 has posted about BluePup and bluetoothctl yesterday:
https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?t=14633
Tags: easy