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I recently installed ubuntu 20.04 and bluetooth seemed to work out-of-the-box. Yesterday, it stopped working with no known reason.

I can turn it ON but the settings still show it to be OFF.enter image description here

I tried the following:

$ sudo -i
$ rfkill list
0: phy0: Wireless LAN
    Soft blocked: no
    Hard blocked: no
3: hci0: Bluetooth
    Soft blocked: no
    Hard blocked: no

and on running bluetoothctl,

Agent registered
[bluetooth]# power off
No default controller available
[bluetooth]# power on
No default controller available
[bluetooth]# exit

What could be the problem and how to tackle it ?

Jeff Schaller
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Pe Dro
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    Try sudo systemctl start bluetooth – Rayleigh Sep 06 '20 at 09:02
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    @Rayleigh It does nothing :/ – Pe Dro Sep 06 '20 at 11:34
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    Don't have enough reputation to post an answer, but this helped me: sudo rmmod btusb; sudo modprobe btusb Found here: https://techstoriesindia.blogspot.com/2020/05/fix-ubuntu-20-04-bluetooth-doesnt-turn-on.html – S. Kaczor Nov 07 '21 at 00:12
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    Happens to me whenever I turn BT off, from then on there is nothing you can do to turn it back on and you have to restart the computer. There does not seem to be any solution here except the cold boot. – ryan2johnson9 Feb 03 '22 at 00:47
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    This helped me https://techstoriesindia.blogspot.com/2020/05/fix-ubuntu-20-04-bluetooth-doesnt-turn-on.html – tiriana Apr 08 '22 at 10:20
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    (Not enough reputation to make this into an answer) Try this: sudo modprobe -r btusb; sudo modprobe -r btintel; sudo modprobe btusb; sudo modprobe btintel. Found the answer in https://dev-qa.com/1968645/bluetooth-crashes-on-linux-5-4-how-do-i-fix-it. – mjkvaak Jun 22 '22 at 11:44
  • For me sudo rmmod btusb then sudo modprobe btusb was enough. Context: having Bluetooth: hci0: Reading Intel version information failed (-110) in the dmesg logs – realsarm Oct 20 '22 at 06:50
  • This must be a kernel bug. I tried all suggestions, but only reverting to 5.15.0-56-generic worked. I'd detail how to do that, but I don't have enough rep to answer this question. – Jason Jan 11 '23 at 04:41

8 Answers8

44

It's a bug: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1859592

Cold boot as in powering off from PC's source button (taking electricity off the mother board) worked for me. Just shutting down and having the motherboard LEDs on didn't work.

Alex Burdusel
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    I just wanted to point out, this is not an Ubuntu problem. I'm facing this in Manjaro. And it's not even a desktop manager problem. I've had this in Gnome as well as KDE. This is a kernel problem (or driver, not sure). For the record, I'm using kernel 5.14.7-2. – Mehran Oct 01 '21 at 01:01
  • I tried to reboot but didn't work. The trick was to unplug it, it is really weird! – Paul Exchange May 31 '22 at 13:17
  • What to do on a laptop if I can't take the battery out? – Miladiouss Sep 05 '23 at 19:08
  • Shutting down the PC and removing the power plug worked. Simply rebooting didn't work. Neither did rebooting into Windows. Glad I finally found this. Was about to order a new motherboard. – domo Feb 26 '24 at 20:16
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I tried various hacks (all at once) and did a restart but I am not sure which led to the bluetooth working right.

I ran

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt upgrade
sudo systemctl start bluetooth
sudo rfkill unblock bluetooth   # rfkill also requires sudo

And after the restart, it worked :?

Adalbert Hanßen
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Pe Dro
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I just experienced the exact same issue, always off in Gnome and no controller found. What do you see if you type the following in a terminal ?

dmesg | grep -i bluetooth

I had this log:

Bluetooth: hci0: Reading Intel version information failed (-110)

To resolve the problem, all I had to do was to perform a cold boot of my laptop.

Cf. comments in https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1859592

Romain Théry
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  • I had the same message in the log. Having my laptop shut down for several hours with A/C adapter connected did not fix the problem. However shutting down, unplugging A/C for a few seconds and then rebooting fixed it. – yankee Apr 09 '23 at 06:30
3

This has happened to me before when I'd accidentally pressed the bluetooth on/off button on the laptop. (fn-F10 on my Thinkpad)

Andrew McCracken
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0

I had the same issue after installing a Windows 10 VM in a gnome-box and giving it access to bluetooth. After doing a clean shutdown of the WIN10 VM, bluetooth became available again on ubuntu.

ff2piranha
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    I don't see how this relates to the question. Your issue was most likely caused by the VM taking over bluetooth, then releasing it when it wasn't needed. – ajgringo619 Dec 13 '20 at 06:29
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Worked for me:

sudo apt install linux-generic-hwe-18.04

Or you can use:

sudo apt install linux-generic-hwe-20.04.

#it would install linux kernel version 5.13.0-25-generic.

Then restart the PC.

Community
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TiYan
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try these commands .. it worked for me

sudo apt install --reinstall bluez gnome-bluetooth
indicator-bluetooth pulseaduio-module-bluetooth
sudo systemctl enable bluetooth
pulseaudio --start
sudo killall pulseaudio
pulseaudio --start
Darshan Padia
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-1

I experienced a similar problem in my case I turned of the Bluetooth module from laptop mode tools, Restarted, and never had any problems regarding Bluetooth since then. Apparently, the LMT Bluetooth module is designed to save power by turning off Bluetooth and it really won't kill much of the battery by disabling it.

Yash Bhambhu
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