Things that are broken in Debian Trixie- file transfer from Android phone with Bluetooth

 It's Déjà vu again! File transfer from an Android phone to Debian has been a pain in the posterior before. I had trouble getting it to work with Stretch, and have been struggling to get it to work, or to work consistently, in Trixie since Trixie was in Testing. I have finally found an (ugly) solution, or a seemingly-tolerable workaround. Or rather, other people have, and I just noticed.

First let me say, Bluetooth is not the best way to send files from an Android phone to a computer. Wi-Fi is a much better option - for example the open source PlainApp.

But it's one of those things that can give a bad impression to new users of Linux if it doesn't work. So it's disappointing to see that the issue was reported over a year ago and totally ignored.

The reason for the current issue seems to be that file transfer is done with the Obex protocol, which requires a data server. Obex has not had its own data server in Debian since Buster, and now makes use of the Gnome Evolution data server.

Fine if you use Gnome, but not ideal if you use another desktop environment, because it means installing a heap of Gnome packages.

Not only that, but not all the required packages are recommended as installs, so won't be available without manually installing extra packages.

To top it all, the extra required packages are not actually necessary for file transfer: they provide an address book extension to the data server. File transfer will work with the (intended) minimal install of the Evolution data server with a hack to make it work without the address book extension being present.

This issue was reported over a year ago, but didn't get any response. There's now a new bug report, so we'll see what happens.

These are the steps required to get file transfer from Android working:

Remove the existing device (phone) and install evolution-data-server (it brings in quite a few other Gnome packages). Then do

# apt-get reinstall --purge bluez bluez-obexd blueman

and pair the phone again.

A few people tried this at the Debian forum and it didn’t work at first, so it may require logging out and back in, or a reboot, or prayers and invocations to your deity of choice.

The work around (see latest bug report) is to delete the file 

/usr/share/dbus-1/services/org.gnome.evolution.dataserver.Sources5.service

and reboot. Whereupon file transfer will reportedly work without installing evolution-data-server.

For the gory details, see these posts at the Debian forum:

Bluetooth file transfer from Android fails

The computer does not receive files sent from the phone via Bluetooth