New Lenovo laptop: Bluetooth enabled but never sees any devices.

Question

Really nasty one this; Bluetooth working fine under Windows (urgh) but never sees any devices under Linux. No errors at all; it just never sees anything. The device is of this type:
Bus 001 Device 004: ID 0bda:b728 Realtek Semiconductor Corp.
It looks like I'm not the only person with this problem:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2242379
http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/hardwa … icate.html
I have tried the LTS kernel and get the same problem. I'm not sure what to try to debug it, TBH I can't find out what kernel module is driving it. The radio is definitely detected, powered on and unblocked:
[root@Lenovo-Z50 ~]# hciconfig
hci0: Type: BR/EDR Bus: USB
BD Address: 00:71:CC:19:58:EE ACL MTU: 820:8 SCO MTU: 255:16
UP RUNNING PSCAN ISCAN INQUIRY
RX bytes:1614 acl:0 sco:0 events:145 errors:0
TX bytes:1583 acl:0 sco:0 commands:133 errors:0
[bluetooth]# show
Controller 00:71:CC:19:58:EE
Name: Lenovo-Z50
Alias: Lenovo-Z50
Class: 0x0c010c
Powered: yes
Discoverable: yes
Pairable: yes
UUID: PnP Information (00001200-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb)
UUID: Generic Access Profile (00001800-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb)
UUID: Generic Attribute Profile (00001801-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb)
UUID: A/V Remote Control (0000110e-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb)
UUID: A/V Remote Control Target (0000110c-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb)
UUID: Audio Source (0000110a-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb)
UUID: Audio Sink (0000110b-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb)
Modalias: usb:v1D6Bp0246d0517
Discovering: yes
[root@Lenovo-Z50 ~]# rfkill list
0: hci0: Bluetooth
Soft blocked: no
Hard blocked: no
1: phy0: Wireless LAN
Soft blocked: no
Hard blocked: no
2: ideapad_wlan: Wireless LAN
Soft blocked: no
Hard blocked: no
3: ideapad_bluetooth: Bluetooth
Soft blocked: no
Hard blocked: no
I have another Lenovo laptop running a very similar install of Arch and this works fine. This has a different Bluetooth adaptor though, made by Intel with USB ID 8087:07da. If they're side-by-side I can pair a mouse and a phone to the other one, but nothing at all shows up on the one with the Realtek adaptor. Any help would be very much appreciated!
EDIT: Just tried this laptop with Ubuntu 14.04 and 12.04.5, didn't work with either. Same problem. Bearing in mind the two threads linked above are unanswered and this clearly hasn't broken recently, I guess this adaptor just doesn't work in Linux (yet). Looks like I'll be returning this one to the store, which is a shame as it took me months to find a 1080p laptop for a reasonable price.
EDIT: Unnecessary test but Fedora 20 behaves exactly the same. I'm not sure how many current laptops on the market use this chipset, but it looks like a lot of Lenovos do. I have a netbook with a Realtek SD card reader that stopped working in Linux due to some kernel modules being amalgamated, but it works again with the current kernel. I may just sit tight on this one.
Last edited by Modeler (2014-09-12 08:45:58)

Answer 1

I had similar issues, downgrading to bluez4 might help, but I found it was much more of a hassle.
I had the most success using vanilla bluetoothctl commands to pair with the device, then using dbus commands to register the bluetooth device as a network access point or see device capabilities.
Are you using a network manager? I found NetworkManager was unable to set up the access point due to an error with its dhcp client setup, but connman was able to do it. Or by issuing the right dbus command, I created the network device manually and then ran dhcpcd on it directly.