Distro Reviews

WetGeek

Axios have you tried disconnecting your ethernet connections

Sadly, that didn't work, either. The laptop is using wi-fi. I disconnected from our network, turned off the wi-fi switch, then turned it back on and reconnected with the network. That didn't change anything.

Axios

WetGeek leave it off and try bluetooth

WetGeek

Axios leave it off and try bluetooth

No. Nothing changed at all for Bluetooth.

WetGeek

Axios researching you toggle the blue lite on off from from software

In the BiOS, there are three things that can be controlled by the wi-fi switch on the side of this laptop. Both wi-fi and Bluetooth are selected. I forget the third thing, but I'm sure it's something I don't have. In the Bluetooth system settings (Plasma), the only thing there is the message that says, "No devices paired."

Axios

WetGeek Sorry didnt explain well the switch will kill bluetooth so leave it on but disconnect from net and try it with that turned off.
Didnt you have a win10 vm where you could go in and see if you could turn blue on-off?
and see if light does anything?

tomscharbach

WetGeek In the BiOS, there are three things that can be controlled by the wi-fi switch on the side of this laptop. Both wi-fi and Bluetooth are selected.

An even more completely off-the-wall question: Does the Budgie Control Center Bluetooth setting show Bluetooth on or off? I keep mine off because I don't use it except on rare occasions, but I'm wondering if there might not be some kind of interaction going on between the BIOS switches, the mechanical switch on the side of the laptop, and the Budgie Control Center setting.

Another off-the-wall question: Did the Bluetooth failure first show up after the Friday update? If so, that might head us in another direction entirely.

The reason I'm chasing these questions is that the ePSA diagnostics showed no issues. That might be because ePSA doesn't test the wifi/bluetooth socket or adapter, but it might be that because there is nothing wrong with the hardware after all.

WetGeek

tomscharbach Does the Budgie Control Center Bluetooth setting show Bluetooth on or off?

No, but it's probably because I use Plasma, not Budgie. The only thing it says in the Bluetooth settings is that notice that no devices are paired. The screen capture of the system info from the terminal does show that the Bluetooth state is down, and bt-service is disabled.

Based on what it says there, I'm guessing that it's a PCI bus issue. Strange that wi-fi is still working.

WetGeek

tomscharbach Does the Budgie Control Center Bluetooth setting show Bluetooth on or off?

Based on what it says there, I'm guessing that it's a PCI bus issue. Strange that wi-fi is still working. The output from lspci shows the wi-fi, but not Bluetooth.

Could Bluetooth show up as 03:00.1 if it were working? Since both radios I've tried are new, I can't blame the cards.

Axios

Just some more input then I got get going
I think there is a function key on dell turn this stuff on off maybe fn+f2 not really sure at the combo
maybe tom would know laters.

Oh to was reading microsoft on bluetooth resetting Might just try turning off bluetooth in bios boot machine
wait a few turn off machine renable buetooth and boot from what i understand that should reset the internal bluetooth doesnt work with external bluetooth tho. Removing windows drivers and reinstalling will also cause a reset of board. Only happens on win10 and up.

tomscharbach

Axios I think there is a function key on dell turn this stuff on off maybe fn+f2 not really sure at the combo

The M4800 uses a manual switch on the side of the computer, not the keyboard.

@WetGeek I was looking through various threads (dating 2015/2016) relating to BT/M4800 issues, and several of the threads (context Windows rather than Linux) suggest that the driver may have become corrupted and suggest reinstalling the driver. If this happened just after Friday's update, I wonder if it might make sense to reinstall the Linux drivers.

I assume that your wifi/bluetooth card is Intel. Is that correct?

WetGeek

tomscharbach I assume that your wifi/bluetooth card is Intel. Is that correct?

Yes, it's part of the Intel wi-fi card.

WetGeek

tomscharbach I wonder if it might make sense to reinstall the Linux drivers.

That might be worth a try, if I can figure out how to do that. I'll try eopkg sr to see if I can find what the package is called.

murbert

I did a full encryption install of Fedora 36 beta on my external NVME drive connected to my laptop. It boots fast, runs fast and smooth and seems very well polished. Overwatch runs better than any distro I have tried. This is Linux done well and in many ways, the standard by which others should be judged. An extra bonus for me is NordVPN has a native client. I'm not real big on Gnome shell so I look forward to the Budgie spin when it comes out.

tomscharbach

WetGeek Yes, it's part of the Intel wi-fi card.

I look at the Report line and see "bt-service: disabled". I think that Solus uses systemd, so see if this command does anything:

sudo systemctl enable bt-service

tomscharbach

WetGeek Based on what it says there, I'm guessing that it's a PCI bus issue. Strange that wi-fi is still working.

It does sound like that, although it is possible (I don't know) that wifi and BT use different pin/socket combos, and whatever is wrong affects only the BT side of the adapter. Whatever it is, it isn't the adapter itself.

tomscharbach

WetGeek Since both radios I've tried are new, I can't blame the cards.

That is just about the only thing we know for sure, although you could reinforce that by reinstalling the OEM BT 4.0 card and see what happens. My guess is that it will be a waste of time, but I guess anything is possible.

WetGeek

WetGeek Could Bluetooth show up as 03:00.1 if it were working?

I'm more confident now that the dongle might solve this. I can't wait until it gets here.

If lspci can't find the Bluetooth device, I'm guessing that the disabled Bluetooth radio won't interfere with using the dongle.

WetGeek

tomscharbach My guess is that it will be a waste of time, but I guess anything is possible.

I'm sure you're right, and I don't think I saved that anyway. Just waiting ...

WetGeek

WetGeek to see if I can find what the package is called.

That resulted in a list of about 100 packages that have to do with "drivers." I looked through it and wasn't able to identify anything suspicious.

I also tried the macro to check on broken packages and reinstall them. It turned up one broken file in the nfs-utils package, but I've always ignored that because there's been no problem with my nfs shares. And one for noto-sans, but likewise no problems witih that. But both were reinstalled, I rebooted, and no changes for Bluetooth.

What I thought was going to be just one "off topic" message has turned out to be a whole off topic thread of its own, so I'm gonna leave this alone until the dongle arrives and I find out whether that solves it. Bye for now.

WetGeek

WetGeek Bye for now.

The BT dongles arrived, I inserted one and rebooted, and it didn't change anything. That wouldn't have helped anyway, because they're BT 4.0. And it was a radio I needed to replace originally, because one of my devices required BT 5.

Now I'll keep using my non-BT mouse and keyboard until I see if Friday's update fixes anything. Still considering getting a newer Latitude if not. A newer one with lots of current features (camera, 16GB of DDR4 RAM, etc) can be had for less than $500 (renewed).

Maybe I can re-purpose this laptop sometime for an application that doesn't need BT.

Thanks again, both of you, for trying so hard to help, but I now know it would probably take a new motherboard to fix the BT problem, and that would probably cost more than a renewed laptop.

« Previous Page Next Page »