Bluetooth issues

When I bought my Dell Studio 17 laptop, I got this nice little bluetooth mouse with it. At least it looks nice. The mouse self-identifies as a "Dell BT Travel Mouse", but from what I've been able to dig up, it is a rebranded Logitech mouse.

Unfortunately, the support for Logitech devices in Linux is spotty at best. You'd think that something as basic as a mouse would just work, but if there is any constant throughout the history of computing, it is the unending failure of hardware drivers.

I can't get it to connect to my laptop.

Currently, I'm running Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty) on this machine, and I'm pretty sure I did have it working on some older version. So it'd seem that there has been some regression in the bluetooth stack since then. As it is, I can browse devices and try to connect to the mouse, and after a long wait the laptop claims to have bonded successfully. The mouse is still in discovery mode, though, and any further poking yields a cryptic error message.

Somewhere I found a link to the Blueman project, and it does provide a much nicer and cleaner interface to the bluetooth devices. Since it's also using the same BlueZ backend as the regular bluetooth applet, I'm not having any more success.

The most helpful thing I've gotten out of it is this error message:

error (/usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/blueman/gui/manager/ManagerDeviceMenu.py:523)
err (DBusException(dbus.String(u'Did not receive a reply. Possible causes include: the remote application did not send a reply, the message bus security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or the network connection was broken.'),),)

I'm guessing that the problem is with Logitech not following standards (not sure there are standards for bluetooth mice, though). Either way, it's frustrating. Perhaps one day the driver support for desktop devices will catch up in Linux, but right now using Linux on a regular desktop machine is still a very frustrating experience...

If there is anyone out there with ideas for how to get this thing working, I'd be happy to hear from you.