Other Debian tips

Debian requires a passkey-agent to run, instead of the pinhelper app, which used to be used before.

Thus if you want to make a bluetooth connection and for instance pair with your phone, you need to have this agent running to monitor outgoing pin requests.

A passkey-agent comes with the bluez-utils package, but it's not compiled.

It's in the /usr/share/doc/bluez-utils/examples/ directory. Cd to it, unzip the passkey-agent.c file and compile it. Put the resultant passkey-agent file somewhere in your path.

Now, before making a connection to your phone, run the passkey-agent by:

$ passkey-agent —default 12345
where 12345 is the PIN you want to use.

Then you can connect to and pair with your phone. If you then authorize the computer on the phone to connect without confirmation, you do not have to run passkey-agent before connecting again.

Finally, kill passkey-agent by:

$ sudo killall passkey-agent


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