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One thing about moving to a tiling window manager like awesome wm or i3 is that
they are so lightweight they are all missing things like bluetooth gui's out of
the box, and you generally bring your own. Today I just needed to connet a new
set of headphones, so I decided to just give the bluetoothctl cli a try. It
seems to come with Ubuntu, I don't think I did anything to get it.
bluetoothctl
Running bluetoothctl pops you into a repl/shell like bah, python, or ipython.
From here you can execute bluetoothctl commands.
Here is what I had to do to connect my headphones.
# list out the commands available help # scan for new devices and stop when you see your device show up scan on scan off # list devices devices paired-devices # pair the device pair XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX # now your device should show up in the paired list paired-devices # connet the device connect XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX
help
Here is the output of the help menu on my machine, it seems pretty straight forward to block, and remove devices from here.
note ctrl revers to the bluetooth controller on the machine you are on, and dev refers to a device id.
Menu main: Available commands: ------------------- advertise Advertise Options Submenu scan Scan Options Submenu gatt Generic Attribute Submenu list List available controllers show [ctrl] Controller information select <ctrl> Select default controller devices List available devices paired-devices List paired devices system-alias <name> Set controller alias reset-alias Reset controller alias power <on/off> Set controller power pairable <on/off> Set controller pairable mode discoverable <on/off> Set controller discoverable mode agent <on/off/capability> Enable/disable agent with given capability default-agent Set agent as the default one advertise <on/off/type> Enable/disable advertising with given type set-alias <alias> Set device alias scan <on/off> Scan for devices info [dev] Device information pair [dev] Pair with device trust [dev] Trust device untrust [dev] Untrust device block [dev] Block device unblock [dev] Unblock device remove <dev> Remove device connect <dev> Connect device disconnect [dev] Disconnect device menu <name> Select submenu version Display version quit Quit program exit Quit program help Display help about this program
Final Impressions
This was something that I have never used, and thought it would be intimidating but it worked great first try out of the box. It could have been my device on the other end, but this was one of the least frustrations I have had pairing a new device.