I wanted Bluetooth on my EeePC for mobile connections and therefore wanted to use BT for an external mouse so that I did not have to use 2 usb ports which would be the case if using a standard wireless mouse.

However, I do not always need the mouse (and I have 2 BT mice) as for quick use on-the-road, the touchpad is OK.

I’m sure there will be cleverer ways to do this, but here’s how I use a BT mouse on my EeePC.

Naturally this assumes that you have the bluetooth services running (sudo /etc/init.d/bluetooth start)

I created a trivial script and installed it as ~/bin/bmouse

#! /bin/sh

sudo hciconfig hci0 up
sudo hidd --search

Now I can connect to any BT mouse by putting it into discovery mode and running ~/bin/bmouse

This is doubly helpful as it seems that after some time of inactivity, the connection is dropped!