A simple bluetooth setup

I set up bluetooth on my Thinkpad Edge 11 this way:

# pacman -S bluez
# pacman -S blueman

I edited my .xinitrc to start blueman-applet when X starts:

...
blueman-applet &
...
exec ck-launch-session wmfs

The tricky part is to be sure that you run your window manager (my one is wmfs) with exec ck-launch-session. If you simply use exec <yourwindowmanager> then the blueman-applet will not work! It will give you ugly exception error messages like this:

Exception AttributeError
dbus.exceptions.DBusException

I suffered some hours to get this done but now everything works fine.

I start bluetooth daemon at boot time by inserting (...dbus...@bluetooth...) in the DAEMONS array of my /etc/rc.conf.

and the blueman-applet icon appears in my systray immediately after starting X, I only need to click on it and manage my bluetooth connection in a nicely built GUI. The bluetooth state (on/off) will be preserved for the next boot, so I do not need to worry about unintentional battery drainage because bluetooth switched itself on at boot time (unless I left my antenna switched on when I stopped my machine).

WARNING: blueman needs some packages that are marked as only optional to work properly. See my post about undocumented dependencies.