Wow, looooong time no post, eh?

I am here to tell you that I am on Debian Wheezy, running on a Dell Inspiron 17R (n7110) laptop. I use XFCE 4.8 for my DE.

Thunar is the default file manager in XFCE, and is fast and easy... but doesn't natively handle OBEX FTP that is what bluetooth needs, s o we need to use FUSE as an intermediate layer.

Here is how to get Bluetooth to work happily in such an environment:

Open the terminal, then:

su

<enter root password>

apt-get install fuse fuse-utils blueman

exit

Now, using your favoured text editor, create a file at your home directory called 'bluetooth-thunar.sh', with this inside it:

 #!/bin/bash
 fusermount -u ~/bluetooth
 obexfs -b $1 ~/bluetooth
 thunar ~/bluetooth

Save and close. Open the terminal again, do: 

mkdir ~/bluetooth

chmod +x ~/bluetooth-thunar.sh

blueman-manager &

su

adduser <yourusername> fuse

exit

Now, right-click the Bluetooth icon in the system tray, and choose 

Local Services > Transfer > Advanced

Set how you want the file sharing to be handled in the checkboxes, and in Advanced, put:

sh /home/yourusername/bluetooth-thunar.sh %d

Now set up the bluetooth phone in the BlueMan Manager. Test the Browse files on device. You may have to log out to make it function.

What you should have is a  Thunar File Manager window pop open to your newly created bluetooth directory, so you can drag and drop files both ways.

Yes, yes, I know... it would be great to have this all pre-done so it is automagical. But where is the fun in using Debian in that case? It's fast and raw because all of that is not assumed about you.