Bluetooth blues

[AndyM]

I am having some problems with bluetooth on my Pinephone running phosh. The bluetooth icon shows that bluetooth is on, and bluetoothctl seems to indicate that bluetooth is working fine - list shows the adapter and devices shows a list of the known devices. However if I select bluetooth from the Settings menu it will either show:
1. that bluetooth is turned off and changing the top right switch has no effect.
2. that bluetooth is on but the devices list is never shown.
3. the devices list is shown, connecting a device shows the device connected and then .... nothing. The device is not connected and often we go back to item 1.

I am not sure what bluetooth manager the Settings menu uses, but it would seem that it may need re-installing.

Does anyone have the slightest idea what is going on?

Thanks

[dukla2000]

Something not right in the garden. I generally do not use BT but switching on now (from Settings, I don't have bluetoothctl installed) I do not "find" a keyboard that is in pairing mode.

(Oddly enough it does find the OBD dongle in my car nearby but pretty sure that is an artefact as it is always there and BT keeps switching on due to the delights of phosh so pretty sure it was "found" weeks ago!)

[AndyM]

Something not right in the garden. I generally do not use BT but switching on now (from Settings, I don't have bluetoothctl installed) I do not "find" a keyboard that is in pairing mode.

(Oddly enough it does find the OBD dongle in my car nearby but pretty sure that is an artefact as it is always there and BT keeps switching on due to the delights of phosh so pretty sure it was "found" weeks ago!)

I think you are right, it remembers previous devices and searches for new ones.

So it seems that "Settings" is gnome-control-center, which calls gnome-bluetooth for the bluetooth control. I have reinstalled gnome-bluetooth and so far it seems to be responding correctly. I will leave this open until I am convinced

[AndyM]

Still causing problems. It seems that if I try to connect the car headset using gnome-bluetooth then sometimes it will connect, but more often it will crash bluetoothd.

Still investigating....

[AndyM]

So I have made some progress. I find that the monochrome bluetooth flag in the status bar at the top of the screen only indicates that bluetooth is available.

It does not indicate that bluetoothd is running.
It does not indicate that bluetooth is powered on.

Also, gnome-bluetooth appears to begin scanning as soon as it is started, which makes it really unresponsive, and blueman does not scale well.

So, in summary, if this works ok for you, excellent, if you have problems, as I have, then you may need to resort to the cli.

[elagost]

I have a custom .desktop file that has a bluetooth action that runs "pkexec service bluetooth restart". I recommend that when bluetooth misbehaves. I frequently have devices connect, not work, and crash the bluetooth daemon. Seems the firmware's a little buggy maybe?

[AndyM]

I have a custom .desktop file that has a bluetooth action that runs "pkexec service bluetooth restart". I recommend that when bluetooth misbehaves. I frequently have devices connect, not work, and crash the bluetooth daemon. Seems the firmware's a little buggy maybe?

That is interesting. I have a Pinephone GUI which does the same for a number of important (to me) daemons. viz. bluetoothd gpsd jamid etc. It checks the state of the daemon and allows a restart if necessary.