When I unboxed my Librem 5 USA, one the first things I checked was the Bluetooth, as I bought a Twiddler one-handed keyboard as a companion tool. However, no Bluetooth was detected on the device. Could you guide me through how to debug and set up my Bluetooth, beyond what I’ve tried?
The solution may be similar to this reddit post on the Librem 15, where either I use proprietary firmware (which I’m fine with) or I purchase a dongle for my phone (less ideal, as it has the one USB-C one port). However, the developers manual seems to indicate that Bluetooth should be responding somewhat. Below are the steps I’ve tried. If it looks like an amateur approach to solving the problem: it is. I’m not familiar with how Bluetooth is set up on a normal machine, so I often don’t know what I’m looking at–just that it is different than what the articles were posting, so please be patient.
NOTE: I’d have screenshots to share where it would clarify what I was seeing, but the application for screenshots fails at taking any picture. I guess that is an issue for another post.
System information:
$uname -a
Linux irma 5.13.0-1-librem5 #1 SMP PREEMPT Thu Sep 23 02:52:40 PDT 2021 aarch64 GNU/Linux
- I checked the top drop-down menu for Bluetooth, and saw it was disabled (greyed/crossed out).
- I went into settings > Bluetooth. I saw that the button to activate was greyed, disabled. And the space where available devices would be said “No Bluetooth Found. Plug in a dongle to use Bluetooth”
- Confirmed that the external kill switches were all allowing access.
- Tried the commands found on this debug page for ubuntu (as a lot of the commands still apply to PureOS). I got the following results
$bluetoothctl --version
bluetoothctl 5.50
$hciconfig -a # Nothing showed
$bluetoothctl
Agent registered
[bluetooth]# show
No default controller available
[bluetooth]# devices
No default controller available
[bluetooth] quit
$rfkill list
0: mic-hks: microphone
Soft blocked: no
Hard blocked: no
1: wlan-hks: Wireless LAN
Soft blocked: no
Hard blocked: no
2: wwan-hks: Wireless WAN
Soft blocked: no
Hard blocked: no
3: phy0: Wireless LAN
Soft blocked: no
Hard blocked: no
- I searched
dpkg
to see what bluetooth packages were already installed
purism@irma:~$ dpkg -l | grep -i blue
ii bluez 5.50-1.2~deb10u2 arm64 Bluetooth tools and daemons
ii bluez-obexd 5.50-1.2~deb10u2 arm64 bluez obex daemon
ii gnome-bluetooth 3.34.0+3436+git7019e38f-1pureos0 arm64 GNOME Bluetooth tools
ii libbluetooth3:arm64 5.50-1.2~deb10u2 arm64 Library to use the BlueZ Linux Bluetooth stack
ii libgnome-bluetooth13:arm64 3.34.0+3436+git7019e38f-1pureos0 arm64 GNOME Bluetooth tools - support library
ii pulseaudio-module-bluetooth 13.0-5pureos+librem5.2 arm64 Bluetooth module for PulseAudio sound server
- I found some commands to list hardware information and got the following results
$ lsmod | grep -i blue
bluetooth 655360 8 bnep,redpine_91x
$ ps -ef | grep hciattach
purism 3280 1291 0 12:41 pts/0 00:00:00 grep hciattach # essentially nothing, showing the command that I just ran
$sudo hciconfig hci0
Cant get device info: No such device
$ sudo dmesg --syslog | grep -i blue
[ 5.167510] Bluetooth: Core ver 2.22
[ 5.167622] Bluetooth: HCI device and connection manager initialized
[ 5.167640] Bluetooth: HCI socket layer initialized
[ 5.167648] Bluetooth: L2CAP socket layer initialized
[ 5.167664] Bluetooth: SCO socket layer initialized
[ 7.933969] Bluetooth: BNEP (Ethernet Emulation) ver 1.3
[ 7.934009] Bluetooth: BNEP socket layer initialized
- I tried checking the status of
/etc/init.d/bluetooth
and it seems to be working fine:
sudo /etc/init.d/bluetooth status -l
● bluetooth.service - Bluetooth service
Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/bluetooth.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
Active: active (running) since Sun 2021-10-10 23:11:40 MDT; 42min ago
Docs: man:bluetoothd(8)
Main PID: 653 (bluetoothd)
Status: "Running"
Tasks: 1 (limit: 3182)
Memory: 2.2M
CGroup: /system.slice/bluetooth.service
└─653 /usr/lib/bluetooth/bl…
Oct 10 23:11:40 irma systemd[1]: Start…
Oct 10 23:11:40 irma bluetoothd[653]: ...
Oct 10 23:11:40 irma systemd[1]: Start…
Oct 10 23:11:40 irma bluetoothd[653]: ...
Oct 10 23:11:40 irma bluetoothd[653]: ...
Hint: Some lines were ellipsized, use -l to show in full.
- Finally, I reviewed the FAQ on Bluetooth (question 24, is bluetooth 5.0 supported?) and saw that general Bluetooth should already be supported.
Any thoughts? Any additional details needed? Thanks in advance for the help!