Bluetooth not working in ubuntu 14.04 LTS

Since when I got rid of windows 8 and installed ubuntu, my bluetooth never really worked. Ubuntu detects the bluetooth hardware (it shows the bluetooth icon in the status bar), and I can turn it on or off and set the visibility and such. However, it is never able to find any bluetooth device, and when I try to connect to my laptop from an other device, it usully doesn't find my computer. If it does find my computer, it will show it using the name it had in windows (I don't know if it's supposed to do that or not), and connecting to he laptop gives a communication error.

I don't know exactely what's causing the problem, but I know that the bluetooth settings on windows 8 were quite glitched, which caused bluetooth to be always on untill you interrupted a device search, after which it was off untill the next reboot. Because of this, I think that maybe the glitched windows drivers messed something up that ubuntu doesn't repair. I did try ubuntu in a virtual machine in windows a few times before fully installing ubuntu, and bluetooth worked fine then.

This laptop has been fully tested in the factory yesterday after an overheating gpu was fixed, and they claim that all hardware behaved as it should. So I don't think it's a hardware issue.

Does anyone know what could be causing the problem, and how to fix it?

Solution 1:

Use rfkill to ensure there isn't any hard/soft block on your bluetooth device. Issue:

rfkill list

If block is there, use the unblock option to unblock it :

rfkill unblock wlan1

Replace wlan1 with the type for your bluetooth device.

Refer Here

Solution 2:

On Ubuntu Gnome 14.10 beta 1 Bluetooth didn't recognize my headset either. It never finished pairing.

@user308564 answer nearly worked for me. However, bluez-hcidump was not available. I only removed it from the package list and voilà, pairing worked correctly.

sudo apt-get install bluez bluez-alsa bluez-audio bluez-btsco bluez-compat bluez-cups \
  bluez-dbg bluez-gstreamer bluez-pcmcia-support bluez-tools bluez-utils python-bluez \
  bluewho indicator-bluetooth libbluetooth-dev libgnome-bluetooth11 libbluetooth3 \
  python-gobject python-dbus

Solution 3:

I have the same issue with bluetooth on Dell Inspiron 15R.

What's amazing, it works perfectly on Ubuntu 12.04. After fresh installation, I was able to connect any bluetooth device. After upgrading to 14.04 - there's no such possibility and when I type:

dmesg | grep -i blue

I see warning can't load firmware.

I suppose that some of the proprietary firmware might be deleted/removed from the latest Ubuntu release. I've tried to install firmware-linux-nonfree package and some of mentioned above, but it doesn't help. I guess that solution might be to find firmware on old Ubuntu machine and copy to the latest release.

Solution 4:

I got it fixed via Ubuntu software center.... I had every bluetooth software (blue icon) installed except the manager. I just had to install Bluetooth Manager from the Ubuntu Software Center.