It was a very quick service at the registry office. The pairing of my bluetooth mouse and my Windows laptop was a happy relationship that lasted for years. However, things started to break down when my mouse started seeing Linux on the side.
I had started dual booting Ubuntu as a second OS, but every time I switched operating systems, I had to pair up my mouse again which was becoming a pain.
It turns out that when pairing occurs, the couple take a vow in the form of a hexadecimal code that Windows keeps in it's registry and Linux keeps in it's file system, the mouse also keeps a copy, overwriting any codes that it already has stored. The trick is to pair the mouse with Windows, extract the hex code from the registry and manually place that code in the relative place in the Linux file system.
Now my mouse plays nice with both OSs, without any further configuring having to be done. A small victory for computing polygamy.
Step by step instruction are here on the Ubuntu forums. I imagine that the process is similar for other distros as well.
