Bluetooth doesn't work. What's wrong?

Hardware
1

I’ve been using my Librem 13 for about two weeks now, and today I wanted to pla some music over Bluetooth. The hardware switch for wifi and bluetooth is enabled (wifi is working fine), but the settings screen for bluetooth says that no bluetooth is detected and it suggests to connect a bluetooth dongle. I pasted a screenshot of the bluetooth screen below. It’s in Dutch but I guess it shows a bit more what I see.

Does anybody know what’s wrong? Do I have a hardware issue or do I need to load some drivers? All tips are welcome!

Schermafdruk van 2018-01-26 18-47-00
Schermafdruk van 2018-01-26 18-47-001015×689 29.7 KB

1 Like
2

Nevermind. After writing my post I found this thread: No bluetooth in new Librem 15 v3

In it, it says that Puri.sm doesn’t load non-free code on it’s laptop, and since the bluetooth hardware in the Librem doesn’t have free drivers it doesn’t work out of the box. To install non-free drivers for it, I did the following:

1 Add the non free repo.

echo 'deb http://httpredir.debian.org/debian/ stretch main contrib non-free' >> /etc/apt/sources.list

2 and then install the package:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install firmware-atheros

After the driver has been installed, switch the wifi/bluetooth hardware switch off and on, and then it works.

I wish you all a beautiful day!

3

I just followed your instructions and bluetooth worked fine afterwards. But I realized that mac address spoofing of the Wifi card did not work any more. So since I prefer spoofing my mac address over bluetooth, I purged the atheros firmware afterwards.

The strange thing is: bluetooth is still working and mac address spoofing is still disabled. The firmware package is removed, so

dpkg -l

does not list it any more. How can that be possible?

4

i’m trying to add the repo, but i’m getting a Permission Denied message. Sudo did not work. any suggestions?

5

This would be a perfect solution if it explained what to do when you get a ‘permission denied’ error from the terminal. as @bronc said below

6

did you try sodu su?

7

Hi @martin
can I please ask how did you purge the ahtero firmware?
is it just a question of removing the non-free from the sources.list?
or is it a purge firmware-atheros