Cannot get bluetooth devices to work

[Kornie]

Hello,

I am on a third unix OS and each OS I tried had issues with bluetooth. I primarily care about getting my headset to work.

- In Ubuntu it was an intermittent problem. After laptop went to sleep I had to remove and re-add the device for it to work again
- In Fedora 25 it detected some random device (I think my sister-in-law's fitbit) but not the headset
- In Fedora 26 I get nothing. After doing some googling I found that unblocking the device through rfkill was solving the problem. But it didn't work for me and I have no idea where to go from now.

Here are some commands outputs:

$ lsusb

Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub
Bus 001 Device 004: ID 04f3:21d4 Elan Microelectronics Corp. 
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 0a5c:6410 Broadcom Corp. BCM20703A1 Bluetooth 4.1 + LE
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 045e:07a5 Microsoft Corp. Wireless Receiver 1461C
Bus 001 Device 005: ID 0c45:6713 Microdia 
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub

$ systemctl status bluetooth

● bluetooth.service - Bluetooth service
   Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/bluetooth.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
   Active: active (running) since Sun 2017-08-13 11:17:06 BST; 27min ago
     Docs: man:bluetoothd(8)
 Main PID: 1753 (bluetoothd)
   Status: "Running"
    Tasks: 1 (limit: 4915)
   CGroup: /system.slice/bluetooth.service
           └─1753 /usr/libexec/bluetooth/bluetoothd

Aug 13 11:17:06 Veritas bluetoothd[1753]: Bluetooth daemon 5.46
Aug 13 11:17:06 Veritas bluetoothd[1753]: Starting SDP server
Aug 13 11:17:06 Veritas systemd[1]: Started Bluetooth service.
Aug 13 11:17:06 Veritas bluetoothd[1753]: Bluetooth management interface 1.14 initialized
Aug 13 11:17:06 Veritas bluetoothd[1753]: Failed to set mode: Blocked through rfkill (0x12)
Aug 13 11:17:08 Veritas bluetoothd[1753]: Failed to set mode: Blocked through rfkill (0x12)
Aug 13 11:17:18 Veritas bluetoothd[1753]: Endpoint registered: sender=:1.53 path=/MediaEndpoint/A2DPSource
Aug 13 11:17:18 Veritas bluetoothd[1753]: Endpoint registered: sender=:1.53 path=/MediaEndpoint/A2DPSink
Aug 13 11:17:19 Veritas bluetoothd[1753]: Failed to set mode: Blocked through rfkill (0x12)
Aug 13 11:17:49 Veritas bluetoothd[1753]: Failed to set mode: Blocked through rfkill (0x12)

$ rfkill list

0: hci0: Bluetooth
	Soft blocked: no
	Hard blocked: no
1: phy0: Wireless LAN
	Soft blocked: no
	Hard blocked: no

Thank you in advance for help

[tryfedoraa]

You can try:

rfkill unblock bluetooth

[Kornie]

It didn't help unfortunately. It's just stuck on "Searching for devices..."

[tryfedoraa]

Ignoring the rkfill error for now, and if the devices you're searching for are switched on, can you check you have the right drivers

[antikythera]

actually that's not far from the cause of the issue. broadcom bluetooth support in linux may well be as flaky as broadcom wireless. the reason being broadcom aren't as willing as Intel, Atheros to release their code to linux kernel and module developers. this means support is somewhat sporadic and usually way out of date.

obviously do not download the driver that cantillon links to unless you have the same notebook and adaptor. Use whatever was supplied for your notebook. if you do not have it, download it from the manufacturer's support website.

https://forums.fedoraforum.org/showp...86&postcount=4

[User808]

Hi.

Try to install the following packages:

openobex

&

bluez-obexd

My bluetooth was completely useless till I installed above 2 packages ...

Best.

[jflory7]

You can try:

rfkill unblock bluetooth

I had the exact same problem as the OP and this did solve my problem. Does this change persist across reboots? If not, how can I set it to persist across reboots? I am currently running Fedora 27 with i3wm.