Blueman applet with missing status icon

After upgrading the blueman package to version 1.23.1 the bluetooth icon in my systray showed a "no icon" graphics:

The Statusicon section under the plugins settings can be configured in this new version of blueman. The default setting is "blueman-tray". I tried to simply modify it to "blueman", the form marks it as an acceptable attribute but it did not change anything, the icon is still not there.

I downgraded to the former (1.21) version from my pacman cache:

pacman -U /var/cache/pacman/pkg/blueman-1.21-7-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz

and my status again appears nicely:

I hope to see a bugfix soon!

Undocumented dependencies

Recently I decided to clean up my laptop so I reviewed my installed packages and removed quite a nice amount of those that I thougt I do not need any more. After rebooting my system I realised that some programs stopped working. There are some dependencies that are marked as optional or even not marked at all but still if you do not install them your application will not work properly (or at all). I have to admit these problems were very rare and after some time I could resolve the problem. In this post I am collecting such not very well documented dependencies. If I find more I will update the entries below.

Blueman needs gconf, gnome-icon-theme and libnotify to work properly! Unless you will not have an applet in your systray and/or you cannot connect to any device via bluetooth.

Wicd client needs xfce4-notifyd, other notification daemons (i.e Gnome's notification-daemon) do not work with it.

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.