Blueman networking plug-in broken in Xenial

[Julius Schwartzenberg]

Trying to enable the networking plug-in in Blueman on Xenial gives a dialog with the following information:

Failed to apply network settings
You might not be able to connect to the Bluetooth network via this machine

Exception
org.freedesktop.DBus.Python.UnicodeDecodeError: Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/dbus/service.py", line 707, in _message_cb
    retval = candidate_method(self, *args, **keywords)
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/blueman/main/DbusService.py", line 36, in wrapper
    return method(*args[1:], **kwargs)
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/blueman/plugins/mechanism/Network.py", line 63, in ReloadNetwork
    nc = NetConf.get_default()
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/blueman/main/NetConf.py", line 219, in get_default
    obj = pickle.load(f)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xff in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)

s

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[David Lechner (dlech)]

Same error, but different exception.

[David Lechner (dlech)]

I was eventually able to reproduce with the same error message as the OP.

I think that the error comes from a corrupt /var/lib/blueman/network.state file. It is possible that when upgrading, the existing file is not compatible. Deleting /var/lib/blueman/network.state will fix the error.

I was not able to reproduce the problem with a fresh 16.04 install.

[infirit (infirit)]

Can someone please attach "/var/lib/blueman/network.state" file so we can investigate.

[Julius Schwartzenberg (jschwart)]

Here's mine. I had indeed done an upgrade from 14.04.

[infirit (infirit)]

Here is a simple patch people can use. To be clear this will automatically drop the previous state and create a new one. This should not cause issues for most people but some that have made specific changes to the ip address or dhcp daemon used will have to to redo their setup in blueman-services.

https://patch-diff.githubusercontent.com/raw/blueman-project/blueman/pull/515.diff

diff --git a/blueman/main/NetConf.py b/blueman/main/NetConf.py
index 61f5a63..24268df 100644
--- a/blueman/main/NetConf.py
+++ b/blueman/main/NetConf.py
@@ -299,7 +299,7 @@ def get_default(cls):
             NetConf.default_inst = obj
             f.close()
             return obj
- except IOError:
+ except (IOError, UnicodeDecodeError):
             n = cls()
             try:
                 n.store()

[Adam (sailing-dragons)]

In 16.04 the line to change is 225. I don't know how to change pages, but the one provided doesn't work due to the line number being different.

[Alain Baeckeroot (alain-baeckeroot)]

confirmed

i just upgraded from 14.04 to 16.04.1

After log in, i have a popup message :

org.freedesktop.DBus.Python.UnicodeDecodeError: Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/dbus/service.py", line 707, in _message_cb
    retval = candidate_method(self, *args, **keywords)
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/blueman/main/DbusService.py", line 36, in wrapper
    return method(*args[1:], **kwargs)
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/blueman/plugins/mechanism/Network.py", line 63, in ReloadNetwork
    nc = NetConf.get_default()
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/blueman/main/NetConf.py", line 219, in get_default
    obj = pickle.load(f)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xff in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)

Google show:
https://github.com/blueman-project/blueman/issues/513 which says it is fixed (upstream ?)

[Jakub Tušan (jjtusan)]

A little different error

org.freedesktop.DBus.Python.EOFError: Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/dbus/service.py", line 707, in _message_cb
    retval = candidate_method(self, *args, **keywords)
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/blueman/main/DbusService.py", line 36, in wrapper
    return method(*args[1:], **kwargs)
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/blueman/plugins/mechanism/Network.py", line 63, in ReloadNetwork
    nc = NetConf.get_default()
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/blueman/main/NetConf.py", line 219, in get_default
    obj = pickle.load(f)
EOFError

[Tekchik (techchick)]

Is this fixed yet?

[Tekchik (techchick)]

Can someone tell me if this is fixed yet?

[Vera Bucek (vbucek)]

Apparently issue still exists because today I updated from Linux Mint 18.3 to 20.04 (Ulyana) and received this exact error which was resolved by David Lechner's fix in post #3.

[Vera Bucek (vbucek)]

Apparently issue still exists because today I updated from Linux Mint 19.3 to 20.04 (Ulyana) and received this exact error which was resolved by David Lechner's fix in post #3.