23

I can't invoke my bluetoothctl anymore. It waits for connections withouth success showing this in the terminal:

me@mashin:~$ bluetoothctl 
Waiting to connect to bluetoothd...

Any suggestion how to start the joyful debuging?

I am using Debian 9.2.

Edit

Output of sudo systemctl status bluetooth.service

● bluetooth.service - Bluetooth service
   Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/bluetooth.service; enabled; vendor preset
   Active: inactive (dead)
     Docs: man:bluetoothd(8)

4 Answers4

27

I had the same problem. I found a solution on archlinux.org's forums.

I had to load the kernel module btusb. To test if this will solve the problem for you, run as root :

modprobe btusb
systemctl start bluetooth

then test if bluetoothctl works. If it does you can make this fix permanent by loading the module on boot. To do that on Debian add (as root) the line:

btusb

at the end of the file /etc/modules.

You might also want to ask systemd to enable the bluetooth service on boot, in this case execute (as root):

systemctl enable bluetooth
Gabriel Devillers
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3

I had a similar situation (I had already enabled and started the bluetooth service and it used to work fine; the service became dead suddenly).

Restarting the bluetooth service solved it:

sudo systemctl restart bluetooth.service
prosoitos
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0

For the first, you need to start Bluetooth service, and then use bluetoothctl.

systemctl start Bluetooth
bluetoothctl
Kele Huang
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0

Another Solution that I tried today for Arch Linux with XFCE is to basically enable the bluetooth service using

systemctl enable bluetooth.service.

I think this service loads the btusb module and then starts the service so you do not need to modify the configuration files.

Dhruv Marwha
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