Better Ubuntu Linux bluetooth management with Blueman

l found (courtesy of Bigbrovar’s post, thanks) a piece of software called Blueman that provides better bluetooth management under Ubuntu Intrepid (it’s also available for other Ubuntu versions). It basicall replaces the current bluetooth manager under Intrepid.

What’s cool about blueman is that in addition to better bluetooth management under Ubuntu, it is also able to manage wireless broadband (GPRS/EDGE/3G) connections hand in hand with Ubuntu’s Network Manager. I’ve tried it on my Motorola RAZR mobile phone and it is able to setup HAL so that I can easily connect / disconnect to the Internet using Network Manager.

The last time I tried if my cell phone is supported by the Network Manager, I had to use the mobile phone’s cable to be able to connect to the Internet. If I wanted to connect to the Internet via bluetooth on my cell phone, I had to setup ppp manually. With Blueman, it’s done automatically for you. Great!

One thing though, it seems that when I connect to the Internet via bluetooth I only get a GPRS connection instead of HSDPA (which is what I get using a cable setup on the cell phone) but this might be probably more of a tethering feature of the limitation of the cell phone. Would be nice if HSDPA is also available via bluetooth. Any ideas?

Other features of the Blueman bluetooth manager software include:

• Connecting to/Creating bluetooth networks
• Connecting to input devices
• Connecting to audio devices
• Sending/Receiving/Browsing files via OBEX
• Pairing

You can setup blueman via launchpad by adding the following line to your aptitude software sources:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/blueman/ppa/ubuntu intrepid main

And then install blueman using the following command from a terminal session:

sudo apt-get install blueman

You can find their public key here.

Visit the launchpad project site of Blueman for more info.