Bluetooth stopped working recently?

[Josef Wolf]

On Tue, Aug 09, 2011 at 06:08:09AM +1000, Stephen Kuhn wrote:
> On Mon, 2011-08-08 at 21:06 +0200, Josef Wolf wrote:
> > I had bluetooth working fine for several years on two laptops here. Last time
> > I used it, (2011-08-03) it worked like a charm. I haven't done any changes
> > on those laptops except running "aptitude update && aptitude safe-upgrade".
> > 
> > Since then, neither hciconfig nor "hcitool dev" shows me any BT devices.
> > 
> > I am pretty much sure this is not a hardware problem, since the hardware of
> > the laptops is pretty much different (one has built-in BT, on the other I
> > use an external USB dongle) and they both stopped working at about the same
> > time. And when I boot the grml live-cd, hciconfig happily shows me the BT
> > device.

Turns out that it was indeed hardware related. On the laptop with the
integrated adaptor, it was disabled by the BIOS (no idea how this could have
happened) and on the one with the USB dongle, there were contact problems on
the USB port.

Sorry for the confusion!

> On a desktop machine I use for multimedia/movies/entertainment, I have
> to remove the dongle, reboot, wait for the machine to get to the Gnome
> desktop, then plug the dongle back in - then it works like a champ. A
> bit of a "work-around", but it's happily using an Apple wireless/BT
> keyboard and can access my phone. I think it's just a matter of the
> module(s) not wanting to load properly...

Thanks for the reply. That made me recheck the issue...