hi there, first time around: I’ve browsed through the archives and it seems similar problems have been reported by and then but I cannot solve the issue nonetheless:
newly installed leap 15.4 on 6y old thinkpad T460s
KDE plasma 5.24.4
in system settings → bluetooth, bluetooth is listed as “disabled”
pushing the “enable” button does not have any effect (does not switch the reported status to “enabled”)
system tray icon “bluetooth” is hidden. when hitting “add new device” it goes into infinite “scanning” loop and (unsurprisingly) does not find any devices.
‘rfkill’ lists devices “tpacpi_bluetooth_sw” and “hci0” (both of type “bluetooth”) as SOFT and HARD unblocked.
with which I am at my wits end…
simple question: how can I get bluetooth enabled and functional?
thanks for this very quick response! I find the following entries in journalctl -b output:
kernel: Bluetooth: hci0: Failed to send firmware data (-38)
kernel: Bluetooth: hci0: Intel reset sent to retry FW download
as said, this is my first try with linux/opensuse on a machine where I have to admin the system myself and thus am totally inexperienced with any hardware and kernel related issues… so while the above seems to hint at “firmware” issues like you’ve suspected what am I supposed to do to resolve them?
03: USB 00.0: 11500 Bluetooth Device
[Created at usb.122]
Unique ID: X7GA.GS0ueMFUyi1
Parent ID: k4bc.2DFUsyrieMD
SysFS ID: /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:14.0/usb1/1-7/1-7:1.0
SysFS BusID: 1-7:1.0
Hardware Class: bluetooth
Model: "Intel Bluetooth wireless interface"
Hotplug: USB
Vendor: usb 0x8087 "Intel Corp."
Device: usb 0x0a2b "Bluetooth wireless interface"
Revision: "0.01"
Driver: "btusb"
Driver Modules: "btusb"
Speed: 12 Mbps
Module Alias: "usb:v8087p0A2Bd0001dcE0dsc01dp01icE0isc01ip01in00"
Driver Info #0:
Driver Status: btusb is active
Driver Activation Cmd: "modprobe btusb"
Config Status: cfg=new, avail=yes, need=no, active=unknown
Attached to: #4 (Hub)
please be patient with me: is there a problem in this report? to me the system just seems to know of the hardware just fine??
disclaimer: before asking here, I’ve browsed the internet these last approx 2 days to find some “cookbook” to follow to resolve the issue but without avail: I just don’t find the info how to identify the root course let alone the exact recipe how to fix it, then. so any help really would be appreciated
@justme and can you post the output from lsmod | grep blue I have a similar device Device: usb 0x07dc "Bluetooth wireless interface" except yours is a Device: usb 0x0a2b
zypper packages --installed-only|grep -i kernel-firmware-iwlwifi
i | Update repository with updates from SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 | kernel-firmware-iwlwifi | 20220509-150400.4.13.1 | noarch
v | Update repository with updates from SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 | kernel-firmware-iwlwifi | 20220509-150400.4.8.1 | noarch
v | Update repository with updates from SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 | kernel-firmware-iwlwifi | 20220509-150400.4.5.1 | noarch
v | openSUSE-Leap-15.4-1 | kernel-firmware-iwlwifi | 20220119-150400.2.3 | noarch
v | Main Repository | kernel-firmware-iwlwifi | 20220119-150400.2.3 | noarch
I’m on MicroOS desktop here, but the speaker I use elsewhere connects fine…
As your user can you open a terminal and run;
bluetoothctl
You should be at a prompt [bluetooth]# then enter;
Agent registered
[bluetooth]# power on
Changing power on succeeded
[CHG] Controller E8:B1:xx:xx:xx:xx Powered: yes
[bluetooth]# scan on
Discovery started
You should start seeing the devices with bluetooth showing up as [NEW]?
in case it does help someone else with the same problem, I document the actions I undertook after which bluetooth now in fact works (although they should not have had any influence …):
rebooting opensuse (again…): this did not change anything, it still was not possible to enable bluetooth (again…) in the systems setting
shutdown, cold start and inspecting BIOS settings, verifying that bluetooth was enabled (as expected, it was, so that definitely was not the reason)
booting into window 10 (also residing on this laptop) and checking that bluetooth is enabled/active there (it was)
incidentally, windows wanted to perform upgrade and requested reboot (granted)
reboot unintentionally proceded into opensuse (simply because of my boot order priority and me not staying in front of machine ;)), i.e. windows has not yet been started again
checking bluetooth in system settings in opensuse now shows that bluetooth is enabled and scanning for and connecting to a bluetooth mouse succeeded (and bluetooth icon no longer hidden in system tray)
I cannot see that any of the above actions should have had any influence on the situation but obviously the state of the system now is different than before :). my best guess in fact would be the shutdown+cold start (which I did not do these last 2-3 days since installing opensuse) although this, too, should not have made a difference…
any tentative explanation what might have caused this “magic” self-repair would be appreciated…
and I will report back if problem re-emerges (e.g. after next shutdown ;)).
sorry, overlooked your message before posting my “problem solved” (or rather: “problem silently went away”) message. the cold start seems to have removed some deadlock in the machine.
regarding the bluetoothctl command: if I do this now (after it in fact works and the bluetooth mouse is connected), I get a sensibly message (namely agent regestered and prompt for the connected (single) device (the mouse).
I will remember this command and the possibility to use it for handling bluetooth connections from the CLI (thank you :)).
absolutely no idea (usually I am on OSX (meaning essentially (a derivative of free)BSD when using the CLI) and never using windows :). and when now booting into the windows partition still in existence on this thinkpad I did not change any settings there. only checking the bluetooth availability there as well as in the BIOS.
so to the best of my knowledge I did not alter any setting. but of course the initiated windows upgrade might have done “something” which restored sane behaviour of bluetooth in opensuse. too bad that I do not understand what that “something” might have been, though
but I am happy that bluetooth has now become functional. thanks a lot for bothering to respond and for providing pointers to some useful commands I did not yet know of.
@Justme
When Bluetooth was not working, what was the status of your Windows system? Was it shutdown completely, or was it “sleeping”?
After you started the Windows update and the reboot, the pc started openSUSE. In other words Windows did not run. Bluetooth was working.
Try booting into Windows and stop it by putting it in sleep, then start openSUSE and see if bluetooth works or not. My guess is not.
Go back into Windows and this time shut it down completely, then start openSUSE and see what bluetooth does. Again my guess is that now it works.
thank you. regarding your questions: windows definitely was shutdown all the time (I don’t use it at all anyway and only now booted it in order to check bluetooth etc.). so that can’t be it, unfortunately.
UPDATE OF SITUATION:
as posted, yesterday after the cold start bluetooth worked and I successfully connected a bluetooth device (mouse).
over night, the machine was in “opensuse sleep” (which I presume does happen when just closing the lid…)
this morning, after wakening the machine I was back to square one as described in my initial post: bluetooth icon was gone from system tray and flagged as “disabled” in system settings and could not be re-enabled (enable button recognising the mouse click but not initiating status change).
after some 5 minutes or so I then explicitly used the “Sleep” button in KDE’s application menu to activate sleep mode and after wakening the machine again, bluetooth was active again…
when closing the lid for 1 minute and wakening the machine again, bluetooth was still active.
again, I cannot really make sense of the situation but as @malcolmlewis already suspected, maybe some power management issue is causal here (even if not from the windows side…)?? but as you can see, I still cannot simply reproduce/force the problem: overnight sleep via “lid closed” brought problem back (bluetooth becoming “disabled and inactivable”), sending shortly to sleep via “Sleep” button and wakening again made bluetooth active, then shortly sending to sleep again via “lid closed” now had no adverse effect (bluetooth still active).
will continue to observe the situation and see whether I can find a reproducible way to trigger the problem. any further ideas would of course be greatly appreciated :).
PS: for completeness two further bits of info although they very probably are of no relevance here:
opensuse lives on an “extended partition” which should be non-contiguous on the disk
I selected full disk encryption during installation
