Bluetooth known issues
1. Bluetooth does not work.
Like Wi-Fi adapter, the support for bluetooth adapter in Linux
varies greatly, depending on hardware vendor support. So the first
thing to check is whether your adapter is supported by the Linux
kernel.
Intel-based adapters usually work very well with few exceptions.
All you need to ensure is you have the latest firmware.
Broadcom-based adapters are very quirky. Some requires firmware
that is not publicly available - you need to fish it out from
somewhere else (e.g. Windows drivers); and you need to use special
tool to upload it to the the adapter. Fatdog64 includes two of
those tools:
brcm_patchram_plus and
brcm_patchram_plus_usb
but due to great variation between models, they may not work.
Run
dmesg in a terminal and check for signs whether the
kernel detect problems with your adapter.
Run "
hciconfig hci0 up" in a terminal and see if you have
got any error messages.
2. Where is the bluetooth applet?
In Fatdog64 800, the bluetooth stack (bluez) is updated to version
5.50 (older Fatdogs used bluez 4.101). This is a major change, and
the bluetooth applet used in previous versions does not work with
the new bluez. Thus it has been removed. We are still considering
a replacement - it could be an existing tool or something that we
will write ourselves.
For now, Fatdog offers a complete CLI-based management for
bluetooth devices. Aside from
bluetoothctl, bluez's own
CLI tool (which is much improved than older tools), Fatdog64
includes bluez-tools (
bt-adapter,
bt-device,
bt-network)
which makes most bluetooth operations such as pairing, connection,
and disconnection very simple.
To find out nearby device: bt-adapter -d
(press Ctrl-Break when done)
To pair with nearby device: bt-agent & bt-device -p
XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX (where XX:XX is the bluetooth mac
address you get from discovery process, above). When you're done
pairing then type killall bt-agent
To connect: bt-device -c XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX (this
works for all devices: mice, keyboard, speaker, etc)
To disconnect: bt-device -d XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX
To view all existing paired device: bt-device -l
(this is lower-case L, not a capital i).
To remove a paired device: bt-device -d XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX
(where XX:XX is the bluetooth mac address from the list, above)
3. My adapter is supported but it does not work. I plugged it
in after the system is up and running.
You need to bring the device up: "hciconfig hci0 up". This is
usually done at boot-up but if you haven't plugged automatically,
it can't be done, so you will have to do it manually.
Also, if you plan to connect to a bluetooth speaker, then you need
to restart the bluetooth service:
service bluetooth restart
. This is because bluealsa (the component that provides bluetooth
audio support) will fail to start if there is no bluetooth
adapter; so you need to restart the entire stack.
4. "Setup Bluetooth Modem", in the Network tab, in Control
Panel, does not work.
Because of the major bluez update (see above), it is completely
probably that the function does not work anymore.
We currently do not have a device that can be used to test this
functionality anymore, so you are on your own.
The relevant function is located in
/usr/sbin/fatdog-bt-find-dun.sh
and
/usr/sbin/fatdog-bt-find-dun.awk, if you want to
troubleshoot it yourself. Don't forget to send a patch if you make
it to work.
5. My Microsoft Bluetooth Mouse does not work.
Certain bluetooth mice, such as some models of MS mice, requires
the "
uhid" kernel module to work. Otherwise, they can pair,
trust and connect, but they will not work.
The solution to this problem is:
- To load the uhid kernel module. This can be done by
running modprobe uhid in terminal, or, you can do this
automatically at every boot by editing /etc/modules
and adding a line containing the word uhid all
by itself.
- Then, you need to edit /etc/bluetooth/input.conf and
uncomment the line UserspaceHID=true (remove the #
in front of it), and then restart the bluetooth service (do
that from Control Panel --> System --> Manage
Servers and Services).