Simon Elliott alug@sionide.net wrote:
As far as I can tell, the default behaviour of Bluetooth on Ubuntu is to display a little Bluetooth icon in the notification area, which serves no other purpose than to notify me that I have Bluetooth hardware and to let me change a couple of useless settings.. By default it appears possible only to receive file transfers from another device, but not to send stuff. Why leave it out? If you've bothered to buy a bluetooth dongle then this is exactly the sort of functionality you do need!
Why? You might be just sync'ing with the phone's PIM or you might be just using a bluetooth device as a network gateway or you might just be pulling files off it from the computer. Running an easy-to-use visible Bluetooth recipient is a (minor, limited-range) security risk. I use sobexsrv only because my phone is a bit old and not very cool and some stuff can only be copied off it by phone-triggered transfers.
That's not to excuse Ubuntu's cryptic error messages. It really ought to warn you that some needed software is not installed.
I don't really understand why GNOME and KDE have invented their own ways of doing this. Why can't they leave the computer-driven send and receive to openobex and the obexfs filesystem?
Puzzled,