Bluetooth tethering

[drequivalent]

Introduce bluetooth network tethering support into the elementary UI.

Bluetooth tethering is a great on-the-go solution for mobile networking. Advantages of bluetooth tethering are:

• it uses significantly less battery than wi-fi tethering
• it is initiated from the device being tethered

The only disadvantage is the transfer speed, which is irrelevant on most mobile networks anyway.

The tethering UI should include:

• the possibility to control bluetooth network interface quickly (in switchboard-plug-network and wingpanel-plug-network)
• monitoring of the bluetooth networking (much like wifi, on wingpanel)
• auto-reconnect after suspend or bootup if the user so desires (to elliminate network setup hassle completely.)

Prior work: Bluetooth Manager (blueman) which uses bluez which we already have, which gives you standard networking interface:

bnep0: flags=4163<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,MULTICAST>  mtu 1500
        inet 192.168.44.34  netmask 255.255.255.0  broadcast 192.168.44.255
        inet6 fe80::5cfd:3cbd:9c1d:9a77  prefixlen 64  scopeid 0x20<link>
        ether 80:5e:4f:85:33:04  txqueuelen 1000  (Ethernet)
        RX packets 5826  bytes 4322982 (4.3 MB)
        RX errors 0  dropped 0  overruns 0  frame 0
        TX packets 6276  bytes 751559 (751.5 KB)
        TX errors 0  dropped 0 overruns 0  carrier 0  collisions 0

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[alcinnz]

I'm not clear, but doesn't this alreaady. I've been connecting to some Bluetooth speakers I have via Switchboard and a status indicator for a while now.

[drequivalent]

You don't browse the Internet via speakers, do you.

I'm talking about sharing network connection from another device like a mobile phone to an Elementary machine.

[alcinnz]

Ah I see, Bluetooth Internet.

I should've noticed which repository this was on!