Disable/Enable Bluetooth Hotkey

[tuxor]

Hi all,

I'd like to have a bluetooth hotkey (Fn+F6), but in order to achieve this, I need a working script to toggle bluetooth state, which is stored in /proc/acpi/ibm/bluetooth (owned by root!).

Usually I can simply enable/disable bluetooth by using the bluetooth-applet in the top bar of my gnome-shell. And this also changes the state in /proc/acpi/ibm/bluetooth.

But when trying to change the state in terminal I get:

$ echo "disable" > /proc/acpi/ibm/bluetooth
bash: /proc/acpi/ibm/bluetooth: Permission denied

So obviously, this line won't work in a shell script that is supposed to be called by pressing a hotkey - the permissions won't suffice.

What could such a bluetooth-toggle script look like to switch on/off bluetooth _without root permissions_?

[Skull One]

Hello,
you can use acpi scripts. Look here: http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to_setup_Bluetooth

To restart acpid on fedora 16:

systemctl restart acpid.service

By the way, you should not write into /proc. Use /sys for this.

[tuxor]

Thanks for your answer! acpid is not installed on my system and to be honest, I don't want to install another service just for this single hotkey. But I will take that method into consideration, if I can't find anything else.

Using...

echo 1 > /sys/devices/platform/thinkpad_acpi/bluetooth_enable

...I'm still missing the sufficient permissions.

There MUST be a way to toggle bluetooth without root permissions and _without_ using acpid, since bluetooth-applet can do this without root permissions and without acpid?!

This is, how bluetooth-applet manages the Bluetooth-Killswitch: http://pastebin.com/3U4VKLtY
This inspired me to install "rfkill". And now

I finally found a solution!

#!/bin/bash

BT_RFKILL=$(rfkill list | grep tpacpi_bluetooth_sw | sed 's/\([0-9]\+\):.*/\1/')
BT_STATE=$(/sbin/rfkill list $BT_RFKILL | grep "Soft blocked: yes")

if [ "x" == "x$BT_STATE" ]; then
	/sbin/rfkill block $BT_RFKILL
else
	/sbin/rfkill unblock $BT_RFKILL
fi

exit 0

[David Batson]

Using your rfkill script, I was able to toggle bluetooth as well.

As root, I created the file /etc/acpi/actions/bluetooth.sh with the contents of your rfkill script. I then made the file executable from Nautilus as root by changing permissions.

Next I ran acpi_listen in terminal to see what Fn+F9 showed. I was getting button/f24 F24 00000080 00000000. I then created the file /etc/acpi/events/bluetoothconf as root with the following contents:

event=button/f24.*
action=/etc/acpi/actions/bluetooth.sh

Finally I ran #acpid restart. Now my hotkey combo toggles the bluetooth radio on and off.

An alternative for some might be to create a custom keyboard shortcut in System Settings > Keyboard > Shortcuts > Custom Shortcuts, however this was not working for me with the Fn+F9 shortcut.

EDIT: After reboot I got some SELinux alerts. Had to run audit2allow 3 times (IIRC) to get SELinux to allow the rfkill script to run.

[rist88]

You can set shortcut on command (I'm on Fedora 37):

rfkill toggle bluetooth