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warsong
Asked: 2016-11-05 07:17:56 +0800 CST

No Bluetooth Adapters found on Ubuntu 16.04

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(I know this error has been reported in different guises but none of the older solutions on this site have worked for me)

I can't see any Bluetooth adapters in the Unity Control Center Bluetooth program. The laptop is a Dell Vostro 3300 and I'm using Ubuntu 16.04.1

output of sudo lsmod |grep bluetooth

bluetooth             520192  4 btbcm,btrtl,btusb,btintel

output of sudo lsusb |grep Bluetooth

Bus 001 Device 003: ID 0a5c:4500 Broadcom Corp. BCM2046B1 USB 2.0 Hub (part of BCM2046 Bluetooth)

output of dmesg | grep Bluetooth

[  516.708947] Bluetooth: Core ver 2.21
[  516.708977] Bluetooth: HCI device and connection manager initialized
[  516.708981] Bluetooth: HCI socket layer initialized
[  516.708984] Bluetooth: L2CAP socket layer initialized
[  516.708991] Bluetooth: SCO socket layer initialized

output of sudo rfkill list

0: phy0: Wireless LAN
    Soft blocked: no
    Hard blocked: no
1: brcmwl-0: Wireless LAN
    Soft blocked: no
    Hard blocked: no

Edit: tried the solution recommended by Pilot6 but it doesn't apply to my Bluetooth chipset.

bluetooth

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    So this is bizarre but it is now working despite the device not being detected on Ubuntu 16.04 earlier. After installing Windows 7 and enabling the device and seeing that it worked fine, I searched for details on the exact module now that I had the Windows name for it. Later I discovered that there was a change in bluez-utils from 14.04 to 14.10 that could have broken the device. (bluez went from 4.x to 5.x) I then installed Ubuntu 14.04 to confirm for myself that the device was working and it was. I then tried to install 16.10 and the device is still working so I am going to assume that getting it to switch on Ubuntu 14.04 or Windows 7 then installing later versions of Ubuntu makes it work.

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