I did get it working. blueman-manager was telling me that bluetoothd wasn't running, and apparently udev is not starting it, so I hunted it down and ran it with an &. The /etc/init.d/bluetooth script most distro's use is nowhere to be found, and a package that installs that doesn't fall out of a search in synaptic either. Between that, and installing rfkill, /dev/rfcomm0 eventually appeared. blueman-manager was then able to run, find the other device and pair them. So now I have a 2nd minicom session running, giving me 2 terminal session logins to a TRS-80 Color Computer 3 in the basement. Its running nitros9, which is a lot like linux. Multi-user, and multitasking.
However, it seems to me that udev /should/ have done that. But udev needs a lot of tlc it seems, it yelps about ATTRS not being used for everything it does do. I tried to fix that a couple times, but docs to tell one whats right about re-writing its .rules files seem to be non-existent.
Whatever change that is needed, is probably needed in every /etc/udev/rules.d/*.rule file.
I would like to thank Texstar for the BFS kernels, damn they run sweet for a desktop. ;-)
Firefox 5 is out, and 4 is officially deprecated, so I assume we'll see that shortly.
Cheers, Gene