Bluetooth supported? Checking in on 2016: yep, still the same.

Pairing up your Bluetooth device was relatively well documented, by the community anyway. It was mostly done using the bluez package from bluez.com. Ubuntu town and in fact all of Linux land was generally at peace and the trendy folk at the BlueTooth Bar were being all trendy-like.

Then it happened. Ubuntu went up one release: Jaunty came to be and subsequently Bluetooth support died. Even now the Internet is teeming with Bluetooth bug reports, problems and forums are filled with questions such as ‘my keyboard is not being paired’. In fact, Debian seemed to be hit as well as some other distributions that leveled up.

What had happened?

read on

Here’s another gem from the Ubuntu malaise: partitioning a disk hangs when booting from an Ubuntu Live USB stick.

Depending on a couple of factors partman, Ubuntu’s installer partion manager, will hang on ‘scanning disks’, from around 43% to 47%. Following are two possible reasons and solutions.

read on

Here’s a quick workaround for connecting and reconnecting a bluetooth keyboard (or any bluetooth device for that matter) in Ubuntu Jaunty and Karmic, even after rebooting. In short it’s a shell script that keeps connecting to your device in the background on a regular interval. Dirty? Absolutely. Does it work? Absolutely, no bluetooth configuration required at all.

read on