Hello everyone,
This is my first post on this forum.. so please excuse any errors on my part.

I know that this question has been much debated about and even probably solved but after a week or two of googleing the solution I was unable to find it. I only managed to find more people with the same problem...

I own a toshiba sattelite a210-19k laptop and have set it up with Hardy distro + winxp (small partition just for AOE II lan games..).

There is a list of things that I still need to figure out and I decided to start with bluetooth, or rather the lack of it. I know there is a built-in bluetooth but my system does not recognize anything and the forums say that bluetooth works out-of-the-box with Hardy.
I will describe one situation which will I think help with the eventual solution for all of you who can help with this.
After not managing to get anywhere with google i swiched to winxp just to see if the bluetooth was at all working (I thought maybe it a physical malfunction). I succesfully installed and used bluetooth on xp after which I rebooted back to linux and the bluetooth was there. After shutdown and again turn on the bluetooth was gone.

Now (again I'm a newbie) this says to me that there is a way to turn bluetooth on/off and since there is no hardware switch to do so, there has to be a software solution which I've not been able to find so far.

Any help is wellcome. If there are some command outputs you would like to see here please name them and I will post. If you have some tutorials that need reading again I am more than willing to give it a try. I really like what I have learned so far about linux and would like to continue.

Thank you for any answers.

I believe that you should be able to enable bluetooth with ACPI, you should have the toshiba and toshiba_acpi kernel module loaded, check this with 'lsmod|grep toshiba'. Load them if they aren't.

Once those are loaded, check to see if it detects everything correctly, 'ls /proc/acpi/toshiba'.

If you see bluetooth in there, to turn it on, you would change it's value to 1, try 'echo "power:1" > /proc/acpi/toshiba/bluetooth && echo "attach:1 > /proc/acpi/toshiba/bluetooth', you might need root privileges for that.

I don't have a Toshiba laptop, I've never worked with one under Linux either, my Asus and Acer have similar functions though.

You may have tried these steps...but....

Ensure that the bluetooth module is running with:

check /etc/rc.d/ or /etc/init.d/ for an rc.bluetooth file. Make sure it's executable and try running it with the "restart" option.

Then, try running:
And see if your device is detected.

ok so here goes...

@elliott678
I did lsmod | grep toshiba and the result was empty command line so I guess it is not loaded (I would like to ask how to load them), furthermore i checked /proc/acpi and there is no toshiba folder or file inside.


@Savet
lsmod | grep -i blue

gives back

redviper@Zmago:/proc/acpi$ lsmod | grep -i blue
bluetooth 61156 4 rfcomm,l2cap

I checked /etc/init.d/ and there is no rc.bluetooth file. there is a bluetooth dir with some files inside but again not that one. And of course hcitool dev is giving no result. In my fist post after I booted back to linux and found bluetooth working I did hcitool dev and it listed a device properly.

any ideas???

rgrds

Run updatedb as root to update the database of files, then try running:

There has to be an executable bluetooth program that kicks off the service.

My first guesses would be /usr/sbin/, /sbin/, or one of the bin directories.

you might also see if there's a man page for bluetooth on your system. It might give you some helpful hints.

I run ubuntu on one of my boxes, and was able to find the bluetooth startup script as /etc/init.d/bluetooth

Your bluetooth settings are located in:

/etc/bluetooth/

I think I have all of these...how should I continue? Is editing needed for /etc/init.d/bluetooth or are there any commands that can do the trick?

thanks.

This means Ubuntu is seeing the bluetooth card just fine, when it is on, turning it on is the problem. I don't think messing with those scripts would do anything at the moment.


Load the modules with 'modprobe toshiba' and 'modprobe toshiba_acpi' with root privileges.

Also make sure the bluetooth daemon is running

you can start it by running the following as root

You can then confirm it's running with "ps -ef |grep blue"

For me, it returns the following:

The above is from a slackware box, your program names may differ slightly though...being on ubuntu.

@elliott678

Another bump.
After "sudo modprobe toshiba_acpi" i get:

redviper@Zmago:/$ sudo modprobe toshiba_acpi
FATAL: Error inserting toshiba_acpi (/lib/modules/2.6.24-21-generic/kernel/drivers/acpi/toshiba_acpi.ko): No such device


@Savet
I did start as you instructed and it returned "starting bluetooth....ok"
Also after "ps -ef |grep blue" i got:

redviper@Zmago:/$ ps -ef |grep blue
root 5520 5471 0 17:02 ? 00:00:00 /usr/lib/bluetooth/bluetoothd-service-input
root 5525 5471 0 17:02 ? 00:00:00 /usr/lib/bluetooth/bluetoothd-service-audio
redviper 5982 5807 0 17:03 ? 00:00:00 bluetooth-applet --singleton
redviper 10820 9929 0 18:24 pts/0 00:00:00 grep blue


It is rather similar to yours as I see, but bluetooth is just as dead as before.

So after starting the service, hcitool dev shows no devices?

Hmmm, I guess your laptop isn't supported by that driver.

I found this, similar enough laptop, they mention the Omnibook driver, which you will unfortunately have to build and install yourself:
https://wiki.kubuntu.org/LaptopTesti...elliteA200-130

It does appear to be an ACPI issue, at least I was on the right track, just had the wrong driver.

Correct. hcitool dev returns "Devices: "..
Only time when it showed result was when i restarted from winxp after usin bluetooth there.

I found this solution also on google and tried to implement it but without success. After that I removed omnibook from the system. However I gave it another shot now but still with the same result, and that is after final step:

redviper@Zmago:/etc/modprobe.d$ sudo modprobe -v omnibook ectype=12
WARNING: /etc/modprobe.d/omnibook line 1: ignoring bad line starting with 'omnibook'
FATAL: Module omnibook not found.


Could be that I did something wrong with the installation, but I installed from synaptics so I don't know what could be the issue. there was a message about not being able to authenticate though, so maybe that is the problem.

Can you go through the steps you used to build and install that driver?

Details will help, especially the names of the packages you used.