I was having trouble getting my USB Bluetooth dongle working on Ubuntu 9.04. The device itself was really cheap ($10 NZD), but from reading the bugs this isn’t the only device having issues. Below is the lsusb line of my device:

Bus 007 Device 002: ID 0a12:0001 Cambridge Silicon Radio, Ltd Bluetooth Dongle (HCI mode)

The problem was that it was extremely flaky, sometimes it would show up and allow me to scan for devices but usually it wouldn’t. Sometimes “/etc/init.d/bluetooth restart” would bring it to life, but usually not. Another symptom was “Inquiry failed: Connection timed out” when doing a scan (sudo hcitool scan).

In the end the solution was upgrading to the latest version of blueman. There are packages available for Ubuntu 9.04 in the blueman ppa on launchpad: https://edge.launchpad.net/~blueman/+archive/ppa

Add the ppa to your software sources list (instructions on the page), and then do:

sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude safe-upgrade

After a reboot I was good to go, pairing and file transfers worked perfectly!

Update

This worked on my laptop but not my media PC, despite them both running 9.04 (media PC is mythbuntu however). I also tried updating to the bluez packages from Karmic which didn’t improve the situation. For all the time I’m spedning on this, I think it’s going to be more sensible to buy another bluetooth adaptor.