GNOME Bluetooth

gnome-bluetooth is a helper library on top of the bluez daemon's D-Bus API. It used to contain widgets for application developers but is now home to everything Bluetooth related for the code GNOME desktop, and nothing pertinent to application developers.

Requirements

• GTK
• bluez 5.51 or newer
• rfkill sub-system enabled in the kernel, and accessible
• the latest git version of python-dbusmock to run tests.

Multiple Bluetooth adapters

The gnome-bluetooth user interface and API have no support for handling multiple Bluetooth adapters. Earlier versions of the bluez backend software had support for setting a "default adapter" but that is not the case any more.

Since GNOME 42, the default adapter is the "highest numbered" one, so removable/external Bluetooth adapters are likely going to be preferred to internal ones.

As the goal for multiple adapters usually is to disable an internal Bluetooth adapter in favour of a more featureful removable one, there are a couple of possibilities to do this, depending on the hardware:

• Disable the internal Bluetooth adapter in the system's BIOS or firmware

• Disable the internal adapter through a mechanical "RF kill" switch available on some laptops

• Unplug the USB cable from the wireless card in the case of combo Bluetooth/Wi-Fi desktop cards

• Enable the hardware-specific software kill switch on laptops. First find out whether your hardware has one:

rfkill | grep bluetooth | grep -v hci
5 bluetooth hp-bluetooth  unblocked unblocked

Then block it with rfkill block <ID> where <ID> is the identifier in the command above. systemd will remember this across reboots.

• Disable a specific USB adapter through udev by creating a /etc/udev/rules.d/81-bluetooth-hci.rules device containing:

SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="0a5c", ATTRS{idProduct}=="21b4", ATTR{authorized}="0"

• If the adapter still needs to be plugged in so it can be used as a passthrough, for virtualisation or gaming, we ship a small script that makes unbinding the Bluetooth driver easier

Copyright

A long time ago, gnome-bluetooth was a fork of bluez-gnome, which was:

Copyright (C) 2005-2008 Marcel Holtmann <marcel@holtmann.org>