How to hide the Bluetooth icon in the panel?

Question

There was an option under Bluetooth preferences in 11.04 to easily hide the icon, but in 11.10, there's a little bar near the top right corner called Visibility. I'm assuming that's what hides or shows the Bluetooth icon, but I can't move it. Everything is locked in my Bluetooth preferences, and I see no unlock button.

Any ideas?

Solution 1

For 11.10

Alt+F2 and paste the following line:

gksu nautilus /etc/xdg/autostart

Search for bluetooth-applet.desktop and bluetooth-applet-unity.desktop files and delete them (I recommend you to backup them first).

Restart and that's all.

Solution 2

I believe the correct way, as per the Desktop Application Autostart Specification, is to create user-specific configuration overriding the system default.

1. cd ~/.config/autostart
2. cp /etc/xdg/autostart/bluetooth-applet* .
3. echo "Hidden=true" | tee -a bluetooth-applet*

Solution 3

I have found out that you can run a certain command that will show all items in the 'Startup Applications' window. Then in there you can set the bluetooth from enabled to disabled. It also allows you to turn off other autostart applications that you might not want. Like Gwibber, I hate gwibber. Anyway the command to show the autostart applications is :

sudo sed -i 's/NoDisplay=true/NoDisplay=false/g' /etc/xdg/autostart/*.desktop

Copy/Paste and then open the 'Startup Applications' and make the changes. Be careful some of those are very useful.

Solution 4

Your bluetooth device needs to be plugged in or turned on for you to edit those settings.

If you want the icon gone altogether, either disable bluetooth in your BIOS (for built in bluetooth devices) or remove the adapter (if you use one).

Solution 5

for Ubuntu [-MATE] 16.04:

• Control Center
• → Startup Application
• Tab: Startup Programs
• uncheck: [ ] Blueman Applet

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Comments

[Waza_Be]

Cannot believe there is no software way to do it! People will still want to use their Bluetooth sometime...

[Jason Southwell]

@Profete162 it's either the indicator or no bluetooth, unfortunately.

[Icedrake]

I wonder why they can't keep it the same way it was in 11.04. In that, all you had to do was click a few buttons and the icon was hidden. Now I have to go through all this just to hide an icon (which I won't, Ubuntu is trying to waste my time). Seems like another way Ubuntu is going backwards. All I want to do is hide the icon, and yet I have to get a Bluetooth device to even think about changing any of the settings.

[Jason Southwell]

@Icedrake that's not Ubuntu's fault, that's GNOME's fault. Complain to the GNOME devs (you will be ignored, but at least you will have made your voice heard).

[Icedrake]

@RolandTaylor I had no idea that was the case, thought it was a part of Unity. My bad. Thanks for clearing things up.

[Icedrake]

Works, thank you! I wish Ubuntu had kept the option from 11.04, don't know why they had to make this so complicated.

[Marky]

@Icedrake: OT - Expect things in Gnome3 to go back to normal after several versions later like KDE. The transition from KDE3 to KDE4 affected a lot of KDE-users including me, and what prompted me to try Ubuntu. I normally didn't even want any Gnome desktop on my machines but Ubuntu was the main reason I at least started appreciating Gnome.

[Martín Casco]

Works for me, THX!!

[Keith Smiley]

This is definitely what people should be doing.

[DrCord]

I had to do almost the same thing but to the file blueman.desktop instead of the files bluetooth-applet* on Raspbian.

[Mark Jeronimus]

I already disabled this before I came here searching