Bluetooth's "Operation Not Supported By Backend" Message

This morning, while trying to move some files between my mobile phone and my Ubuntu 8.04.1 machine -- I was greeted with a "Operation Not Supported By Backend" message with the address of my phone and the drag between Nautilus windows was terminated.

Turns out, it is because the GVFS backend for Bluetooth doesn't support the device -- and using the older, GNOME-VFS way isn't supported either.

The 'Send-To Bluetooth' option (right-clicking the files you want to send and selecting your mobile) works as per normal and successfully transferred 25M of files to my phone in under a minute.

Bluetooth & Ubuntu 7.10

Quick-and-dirty HOWTO for people looking to get a bluetooth compatible phone to talk to Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy) -- any phone should work, i've used a Nokia N80 successfully.

First, make sure you've got the Bluetooth Icon in the taskbar, if you don't -- there's a possibility your bluetooth adapter doesn't work with (or wasn't detected by) Ubuntu.

Second. go to a terminal and type:

sudo apt-get -f install gnome-vfs-obexftp

Which should pull in a bunch of dependancies for libopenobex1 and company.

Thirdly, if you'd like to use GNOME's "Send To" function to push files to your Phone (like to can to Evolution currently) you can type:

sudo apt-get -f install gnome-bluetooth

note: currently, the gnome-bluetooth package doesn't authomatically start the transfer daemon, you'll need to go through System -> Preferences -> Sessions and add a new program to the startup list, my settings for this were as follows

Name: Bluetooth File Transfer
Command: gnome-obex-server
Comment (optional): Transfer files via Bluetooth from "Send To"

Now, rather than seeing something similar to:

The Browse action reports:
"obex://[nn:uu:mm:bb:ee:rr]" is not a valid location.

You should be able to transfer files between your phone and your Gutsy machine :)