How to enable/disable Bluetooth?

SUSE Product Topics SLED Applications
1

How do I enable and disable Bluetooth in Suse Enterprise Linux SP3?

2

Are you asking because your machine has Bluetooth and it’s not working, or because you have Bluetooth working but sometimes want to turn it off?

3

The Bluetooth icon is sometimes showing and sometimes it’s not. I just want to know how to turn it off, I don’t see an option in the panel bar. I also want to know how to remove the icon. It seems there isn’t an option to show up Bluetooth icon in the panel bar settings.

4

Assuming you’re using GNOME (another post asked about installing KDE), if you click the Bluetooth icon there should be a Preferences option that opens a dialogue that includes an option ‘Show bluetooth icon’. If you untick that option and close the window, you can get the preferences back again by running

$ bluetooth-properties

As for turning Bluetooth off, honestly not sure about that. My Bluetooth comes by way of a dongle plugged in to a USB port and I’ve never thought about turning it off. Now that I do I can’t just see a way to do so. According to https://help.gnome.org/users/gnome-bluetooth/stable/gnome-bluetooth-applet.html.en there should be an option to turn off Bluetooth in the menu that appears when you click the icon, but I don’t have that and presumably you don’t either. That documentation unhelpfully doesn’t make any reference to which version(s) of GNOME is applies to but from the screenshots it’s evidently not GNOME 3 so I assume it’s some version of GNOME 2. (SLED 11 SP3 has GNOME 2.28.)

I assume your Bluetooth is built in rather than via dongle plugged in to a USB port? Is there a keyboard hot key to enable/disable Bluetooth? It so it may be possible to get that to work. There’s references in SLED 11 SP3 to such things (/usr/share/hal/fdi/information/10freedesktop/10-thinkpad-rfkill-switch-bluetooth.fdi /usr/share/hal/fdi/information/10freedesktop/10-dell-rfkill-switch-bluetooth.fdi)

5

[QUOTE=mikewillis;21617]Assuming you’re using GNOME (another post asked about installing KDE), if you click the Bluetooth icon there should be a Preferences option that opens a dialogue that includes an option ‘Show bluetooth icon’. If you untick that option and close the window, you can get the preferences back again by running

$ bluetooth-properties

As for turning Bluetooth off, honestly not sure about that. My Bluetooth comes by way of a dongle plugged in to a USB port and I’ve never thought about turning it off. Now that I do I can’t just see a way to do so. According to https://help.gnome.org/users/gnome-bluetooth/stable/gnome-bluetooth-applet.html.en there should be an option to turn off Bluetooth in the menu that appears when you click the icon, but I don’t have that and presumably you don’t either. That documentation unhelpfully doesn’t make any reference to which version(s) of GNOME is applies to but from the screenshots it’s evidently not GNOME 3 so I assume it’s some version of GNOME 2. (SLED 11 SP3 has GNOME 2.28.)

I assume your Bluetooth is built in rather than via dongle plugged in to a USB port? Is there a keyboard hot key to enable/disable Bluetooth? It so it may be possible to get that to work. There’s references in SLED 11 SP3 to such things (/usr/share/hal/fdi/information/10freedesktop/10-thinkpad-rfkill-switch-bluetooth.fdi /usr/share/hal/fdi/information/10freedesktop/10-dell-rfkill-switch-bluetooth.fdi)[/QUOTE]

Why does it randomly show Bluetooth icon sometimes? My computer came with Bluetooth by the way.

6

I’ve no idea. My Bluetooth icon is always there. If you Bluetooth is built in, I’d guess maybe the device is being turned off for power saving, but this is entirely a guess. Is the Bluetooth device attached to the USB bus, or PCI?

$ /usr/bin/lsusb $ /sbin/lspci -nnk

7

[QUOTE=mikewillis;21659]I’ve no idea. My Bluetooth icon is always there. If you Bluetooth is built in, I’d guess maybe the device is being turned off for power saving, but this is entirely a guess. Is the Bluetooth device attached to the USB bus, or PCI?

$ /usr/bin/lsusb $ /sbin/lspci -nnk[/QUOTE]

Thanks for your help, it seems Suse Enterprise Linux Desktop isn’t for me. I found the problem with multimedia codecs also, I had to download a file that was around 3 GB big. I will switch to another operating system.

Thanks,

8

Well it’s not for everyone. The name is a clue as to its target market ;). Perhaps you’d do better with openSUSE?

That would be the iso for the SLE SDK, which the README states is required.