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Thursday, November 7, 2013

Verify if a Linux computer has the Bluetooth hardware

Many laptops today come with a Bluetooth radio. For desktops however, most likely you need to go buy a Bluetooth USB dongle.

If you don't know whether your computer has the Bluetooth hardware, the following command will help you find out. 

$ lsusb |grep Bluetooth
Bus 004 Device 003: ID 0cf3:3005 Atheros Communications, Inc. AR3011 Bluetooth
$

If the search returns a Bluetooth device, it indicates strongly that your computer has a Bluetooth chip in it.

Note that simply searching for Bluetooth in your kernel ring buffer is NOT conclusive. My Debian desktop computer does not have the Bluetooth radio, but dmesg returns Bluetooth nevertheless. 

$ dmesg |grep -i Bluetooth
[   16.383573] Bluetooth: Core ver 2.16
[   16.383591] Bluetooth: HCI device and connection manager initialized
[   16.383593] Bluetooth: HCI socket layer initialized
[   16.383595] Bluetooth: L2CAP socket layer initialized
[   16.383600] Bluetooth: SCO socket layer initialized
[   16.404892] Bluetooth: RFCOMM TTY layer initialized
[   16.404900] Bluetooth: RFCOMM socket layer initialized
[   16.404902] Bluetooth: RFCOMM ver 1.11
[   18.273794] Bluetooth: BNEP (Ethernet Emulation) ver 1.3
[   18.273797] Bluetooth: BNEP filters: protocol multicast

Armed with the Bluetooth hardware, you are now ready to pair with a Bluetooth device.

If you are interested in Bluetooth, please see my other post:

2 comments:

  1. AnonymousNovember 11, 2013 at 7:20 PM

    Your grep -i is more than enough to ignore the case, so I have no idea why you go the extra length of specifying grep -i Bluetooth.
    No need to capitalize the b in bluetooth.

    ReplyDelete
  2. MohitSeptember 4, 2014 at 10:14 AM

    Always check whether your Bluetooth hardware is enabled from BIOS.
    Steps here: http://download.lenovo.com/express/HT071417.html

    ReplyDelete