Distro Reviews

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

Axios leave it off and try bluetooth

No. Nothing changed at all for Bluetooth.

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.

Axios

If you type in terminal bluetoothctl it should come back Agent registered only if bluetooth is off.
If it is on and looking for connections it will scroll the below screen.

I got this info solus forum lost the freaking link sorry
(Kiakra) had the commands listed for bluetoothctl might be of help but i would say if none these helped it be driver issue or something. If bluetooth is in airplane mode (blue stays on just doesnt work) none those commands will work
I have a tray icon bluetooth in budgie click on it lets me disable airplane mode and bluetooth settings.
(just info) I would maybe try the agent on command?
Tried it on my laptop was quiet interesting maybe at least it tell you if blue is responding to anything

WetGeek

Axios maybe at least it tell you if blue is responding to anything

bluetoothctl

Waiting to connect to bluetoothd...

This is all I get after several minutes of waiting for a timeout. I'll try reinstalling bluetoothd, but if that was the problem, it wouldn't help (possibly) until after Friday's update.

I considered the possibility that the update would actually fix the problem, and decided that it was near 0. I went ahead and ordered the newest refurbished Latitude I could find. $579, but it gets me a newer generation of i7, newer wi-fi and BT, twice the memory I now have, DDR4 memory instead of DDR3, a 500GB SSD, a webcam, and other nice things. Andn it's guaranteed for 90 days.

I've had the M4800 for several years, and definitely got more than my money's worth out of it, so I can't complain. And for what I use this laptop for -- email, browsing, and VMs -- the Latitude should work well.

Axios

WetGeek Ya I agree its not responding Only other thing I would try is a reset like I said earlier
Other than that prob wouldnt mess with it if its eating wifi cards its time to replace.
If you type bluetoothctl power on or bluetoothctl agent on (not sure if agent is the service or not)
Ya I got a dell lattitude 55 something with docking station got rid my old dos machines needed serial ports in dos..lol everybody said I could not run dos from win7 but i do it for what little I need it.(Love that laptop fast to with sd)
good luck.

murbert

WetGeek I considered the possibility that the update would actually fix the problem

Have you tried running a live USB to see if it works with that? The Fedora 36 beta will have a recent kernel

tomscharbach

Long live the Latitude! Trust me, with an i7 (6/7/8 Gen), DDR4, 500GB and 8/16 GB of memory, you will have no problems at all with your intended use.

When you get it, do two things before you do anything else: (1) while still running Windows, go to Dell support, either enter the Service Tag # or let Dell identify the computer online, and update BIOS if needed, and (2) download the Service Manual in pdf form. Latitudes are very serviceable, but it helps to have the manual.

Tom a/k/a Killjoy 😅

WetGeek

tomscharbach When you get it, do two things before you do anything else:

Will do. Thanks again. It'll be here in 4 days, so I've got 4 more days of keeping two keyboards and two mouses by my chair. By the way, the media machine that streams to our TV is an Inspiron 3880 Desktop. We're pretty much a DELL family here.

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