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.
- 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.
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
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Disable the internal adapter through a mechanical "RF kill" switch available on some laptops
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Unplug the USB cable from the wireless card in the case of combo Bluetooth/Wi-Fi desktop cards
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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 unblockedThen 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.rulesdevice 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
A long time ago, gnome-bluetooth was a fork of bluez-gnome, which was:
Copyright (C) 2005-2008 Marcel Holtmann <marcel@holtmann.org>