Hi everyone,
I am having trouble getting the Realtek RTL8761B USB dongle to work in Debian. I have the firmware properly installed (I believe) but it still does not show up in blueman-applet/blueman-manager. Any ideas? It just says there is "no dongle" when I try to start blueman. When I look at the bluetooth settings from within gnome, it acts like there is a dongle there but says it needs to be "turned on". So I click the little button to "turn it on" and it does nothing. If I unplug it, it will say, "Please plug in a dongle" as if it does recognize it. Here is a snippet of dmesg:

[ 134.842763] usb 1-1.3: New USB device found, idVendor=0bda, idProduct=8771, bcdDevice= 2.00
[ 134.842767] usb 1-1.3: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
[ 134.842770] usb 1-1.3: Product: Bluetooth Radio
[ 134.842772] usb 1-1.3: Manufacturer: Realtek
[ 134.842774] usb 1-1.3: SerialNumber: 00E04C239987
[ 134.848442] Bluetooth: hci0: RTL: examining hci_ver=0a hci_rev=000b lmp_ver=0a lmp_subver=8761
[ 134.849983] Bluetooth: hci0: RTL: rom_version status=0 version=1
[ 134.849987] Bluetooth: hci0: RTL: loading rtl_bt/rtl8761b_fw.bin
[ 134.854050] bluetooth hci0: firmware: direct-loading firmware rtl_bt/rtl8761b_fw.bin
[ 134.854073] Bluetooth: hci0: RTL: loading rtl_bt/rtl8761b_config.bin
[ 134.854469] bluetooth hci0: firmware: direct-loading firmware rtl_bt/rtl8761b_config.bin
[ 134.854489] Bluetooth: hci0: RTL: cfg_sz 14, total sz 11678
[ 134.931000] Bluetooth: hci0: RTL: fw version 0x097bec43

UPDATE: I deleted /lib/firmware/rtl_bt/rtl8761b_config.bin and now the dongle works. I get an error from dmesg about that file when I plug the dongle in but it still works. I tried downloading that file from another source to see if it would work.... it doesn't. The only thing that seems to work is if I don't have that file in there. It's weird because when it's loaded there is no error in dmesg, yet it doesn't work. When it's not loaded dmesg gives an error but the dongle works. :shrugs:

I would guess that the default config when the firmware loads is altered when the config file loads. If your system works without the config file then it seems it is not needed and interferes.

Consider yourself very fortunate if that is the worst problem you run into with RealTek.