Driver help - What to do if there are no Linux drivers?

[Dusty11]

Hello all,

I have bought a USB bluetooth device which works fine under XP and Vista (after installing the included drivers) but Linux does not see it as a bluetooth device, which obviously means my distro hasn't included a driver for it... And as far as I can find, there is no Linux driver for it, what can I do?!

What do you guys do if there isn't Linux drivers for your hardware?

Distro/ Backtrack 3 (Slax)
USB Device/ LM-055

Thanks for reading

[Freston]

Welcome to the forums!

Most Bluetooth dongles 'just work' under Linux, but you may need to install the BlueZ package. You'll find that as all Bluetooth devices use the same protocol, that no individual drivers for individual devices are necessary. Just BlueZ.

Also, you need root access to use your launch any connection.

Try running hciconfig as root with the dongle plugged in. If you have BlueZ installed it will probably detect your dongle as hci0

[bigtomrodney]

I am surprised it isn't working, I thought that most bluetooth adaptors could use the same driver. As Freston said ensure you have bluetooth support installed (bluez/kbluetoothd etc).

[Freston]

Reading bigtomrodney's, I remembered something funny... The system gives no feedback if there is no error. If all is installed properly it doesn't do anything to tell you this. The first time I used Bluetooth on Linux I was wondering why it didn't work even though I did everything right. But I was wrong. It worked. As it had been doing all along.

There is some weird irony in troubleshooting a working system and getting annoyed that you're not receiving error messages



If you installed BlueZ (or if it already was installed) you can find out the name of your dongle by typing >hciconfig<. It'll have a name like hci0. If it's down, you can get it up by typing >hciconfig hci0 up<

You can scan for devices by typing >hcitool scan<. Another important command is >hidd<. I connect my Bluetooth mouse by typing >hidd --connect {mac address}< (or rather, my system does this for me, but this is the command it executes)

That's all there is to it. Many distro's offer GUI implementations of these commands and nice automated tools to do things automatically.

[Dusty11]

Thanks for the replys

I should have said in the first post, usbshow (I think that was the command) brings it up as a device but doesn't give much info about it. Hciconfig brings up nothing. Thats how I figured it wasn't 'just working'.

Are you guys saying it might work if I installed this BlueZ package?

One of the tools included in the distro, ussp-push says it uses BlueZ, does this mean that its already installed?

Ussp-Push

ussp-push is a OBEX object pusher for Linux, using the BlueZ BlueTooth stack. The original ussp-push implementation required explicit binding to RFCOMM channels before the usage, that made it quite cumbersome.

Thanks!

[Freston]

The hciconfig command is part of the BlueZ package, so if that command was found I reckon the package is installed. (see below)

Can you plug in the dongle and run the following three commands (preferably in this order)?:

lsusb
dmesg | tail
hciconfig

Post output here.


I was thinking for a moment that it may be a kernel issue, as you need kernel support for devices. But a quick search led me to Wikipedia, which claims Bluetooth comes with the package. *pfew* 'cuz I woudn't know how to recompile the kernel of a LifeCD

[Dusty11]

Thanks for your time man

LSUSB

Bus 1 Device 4: ID 1385:4250 Netgear, Inc WG111T
Bus 1 Device 2: ID 07ab:fcfe Freecom Technologies
Bus 1 Device 1: ID 0000:0000
Bus 2 Device 2: ID 15ca:00c3 Textech International Ltd. Mini Optical Mouse
Bus 2 Device 1: ID 0000:0000
Bus 3 Device 4: ID 0a5c:4503 Broadcom Corp.
Bus 3 Device 3: ID 0a5c:4502 Broadcom Corp.
Bus 3 Device 2: ID 0a5c:4500 Broadcom Corp.
Bus 3 Device 1: ID 0000:0000

dmesg | tail

bcm43xx: Chip initialized
bcm43xx: 30-bit DMA initialized
bcm43xx: Keys cleared
bcm43xx: Selected 802.11 core (phytype 2)
bcm43xx: set security called, .active_key = 0, .level = 1, .enabled = 1, .encrypt = 1, .auth_mode = 0
SoftMAC: Open Authentication completed with 00:14:7f:94:a9:71
Bluetooth: Core ver 2.11
NET: Registered protocol family 31
Bluetooth: HCI device and connection manager initialized
Bluetooth: HCI socket layer initialized

HCICONFIG

*nothing*

P.S For LSUSB, the NetGear is my USB wifi card, freecom is one of my external hdds, the mouse is my... mouse, and the three broadcoms... well I guess thats something to do with bluetooth...

[Freston]

I don't know where the Backtrack init scripts are, so you'll probably have to look around for them, but what you'll want to look for is some equivalent of:
/etc/rc.d/rc.bluetooth
or
/etc/initd/bluetooth
or something similar.


See if it's executable. Change it to executable with >chmod +x /path/name_of_file< if it's not. Then start the service with >/path/name_of_file restart<

Then try hciconfig again. I have two different Broadcoms and both work fine. I'm guessing you don have the Bluetooth service running, although hciconfig should still detect the device

[Dusty11]

Still no luck mate : ( I did what you said in the last post but still nothing shows up under hciconfig...

Any other suggestions bud? This is beginning to really frustrate me now!

[Freston]

Well something's wrong

Maybe here you may find something fitting to your situation?