I have just spent an annoying evening trying to get my little bluetooth keyboard working. Without success. Plenty of websites seem to offer instructions, but so far none of them have worked.

I'm pretty sure the bluetooth adapter is compatible. It certainly gets as far as showing the ids of my keyboard and a nearby laptop, but after, everything I can try I'm still net getting to the point where I can type keys and have them appear on the Raspberry Pi. I'm beginning to wonder if this is a reasonable thing to do at all.

I started by following some instructions from "Raspberry Pi Spy" about connecting a Wii remote by bluetooth:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends bluetooth

pi@raspberrypi ~ $ sudo service bluetooth status
[ ok ] bluetooth is running.

pi@raspberrypi ~ $ hcitool scan
Scanning ...
        00:12:A1:70:42:78       Bluetooth Keyboard
        ...

This seemed to show that the hardware is working. So far so good. But how do I tell the Raspberry Pi to use the bluetooth keyboard? I had great hopes from a Raspberry PI forum thread titled Pairing my Bluetooth Keyboard/touchpad. This suggested:

I got it to work. Here's what I had to do (I basically followed the instruction from http://wiki.debian.org/BluetoothUser:

apt-get install bluetooth bluez-utils blueman
startx

After installation went through and you get into the gui, it's quite easy to pair the Rii with the Pi.

I did that, but found that startx did nothing for me. Of course, I am connected to the Raspberry Pi over ssh. So I took a detour of a few hours trying various ways to show a Linux X desktop.

Given that I already have X forwarding working well, I thought I'd start with a remote X server as described on No spare HDMI monitor? XDMCP setup HOWTO. Despite trying a variety of things, I could not get anything out of this other than a blank black screen. Eventually finding some instructions for using VNC which worked, albeit fairly slowly without the graphical acceleration of the Pi screen.

As for how to "pair" the keyboard I was stumped. The instructions stop here. Later in the thread, someone else mentions some sort of bluetooth icon, but I could not find one.

Much as I hate to admit it, I gave up. All this failing had exhausted me. It seems that bluetooth on the Raspberry Pi is just too difficult, so I'll have to abandon this little keyboard and mouse, leaving it to my desktop, laptop and phone, all of which work happily with it with no problems at all.