Matt Van Stone

I am writing this while it is still fresh in my mind. After running Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy Eft for a few months now and having to reconnect my USB dongle for my Bluetooth wireless keyboard every time I started it up, I finally got annoyed enough to try and fix it.

I installed Edgy right when it came out and right away realized my keyboard and mouse were not working. I went back to a wired one so that I could do some reading on the issue on ubuntuforums.org. Right away I discovered that others were having the same issue, but there wasn’t much feedback, so I just let it be. The most I could find was the peripherals would work again if you unplugged and plugged back in the USB adapter. This was all 2 or 3 months ago.

Tonight I went back on ubuntuforums.org to find quite a bit of replies and a lot of new posts around Bluetooth and Edgy. Most had to do with mice not being recognized by built-in Bluetooth receivers. However, this wasn’t my issue. My issue was specifically with the Logitech MX5000 desktop including the MX1000 mouse. Digging a bit more I found the official bug report and in there I found some help.

First off I found that if you remove all of the bluez packages in most cases the bluetooth mouse/keyboard will start working again. This was the case for me. I did a quick

sudo apt-get remove bluez-cups bluez-pcmcia-support bluez-pin bluez-utils

then rebooted and to my surprise my mouse worked without having to touch the dongle. Just to make double-sure I did a complete shutdown and power on, and again it worked.

Don’t get too excited though… this is really only a workaround. If you use any other Bluetooth devices (phone, headset, camera, etc), removing the bluez packages will mean you will no longer be able to connect these devices. However, that didn’t matter in my situation because I don’t have any of those.

From the bug report I also found that this seems to be a bug at the kernel level with bluez and it should be fixed when Ubuntu goes to kernel 2.6.19. The only thing I’m not sure about is this post:

The kernel patch applies to all platforms (it changes arch-independent sources).

But the bug doesn’t occur on the other platforms:
- x86 is 32bit userspace on a 32bit kernel
- amd64 is 64bit userspace on a 64bit kernel.

The bug only appears when a 32bit userspace is used on a 64bit kernel – this is the powerpc64 platform.

So the kernel patch applies to all platforms, but it only fixes breakage specific for powerpc64.

So this may mean that the bug is only fixed on the powerpc platform. I guess I’ll have to wait and see.

Here is the link to Bug #32415: Bluetooth Mouse and Keyboard Broken in Dapper/Edgy/Feisty encase anyone is interested in reading up on it. Oh come on… I know you are excited.