I installed Linux Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) in my Dell Mini 9 (Inspiron 910). Everything works fine, except for the bluetooth support. Occasionally, the bluetooth service apparently dies, and I don't know exactly why. When this happens, I cannot restart the bluetooth service simply with "service bluetooth restart"; even after doing that, the report resulting from "service bluetooth status" is "Bluetooth is *not* running". There are no logs that could give a clue as to what's going on. Since the bluetooth service is down, the bluetooth application (blueman) does not work either.
The bluetooth device in this Dell mini is a USB device identified as:
Bus 005 Device 004: ID 413c:02b0 Dell Computer Corp.
You can check your machine with this command: "lsusb -v |grep Bluetooth"
I figured that the hardware bluetooth device must be switched off (again, for some odd reason), and sure enough, that seemed to be the problem. So the solution I found is:
- Turn the hardware bluetooth device on
- Restart the bluetooth service
- Run my bluetooth application (blueman)
1) Turn the hardware bluetooth device back on. The best way I found to do this is by using the "aircraft manager" application. You can install this with this set of commands:
sudo apt-get install aircraft-manager
Now you will have a nice command-line tool, /usr/bin/aircraft-manager-util
To use it:
/usr/bin/aircraft-manager-util BT on (to turn bluetooth on)
/usr/bin/aircraft-manager-util BT status (to check the status of the bluetooth hardware)
2) Once the device is turned on, restart the bluetooth service in Linux:
sudo service bluetooth restart
You can check that the service is indeed running:
sudo service bluetooth status
3) Restart your blueman applet:
killall blueman-applet
blueman-applet &
At this point, the bluetooth application should be fully operational again.
References:
http://www.ubuntumini.com/2009/12/aircraft-manager-turn-wifi-bluetooth.html
http://blueman-project.org/
