[Solved] Bluetooth not working at all on vanilla Arch but works fine with Windows 7/8/10

[stable mason]

Greetings.
I have a Lenovo G40-30, that I thought had a broken bluetooth chip or something for years.
figures out that it does work perfectly under Windows, which is strange.
I'll provide the detailed hardware information, in order to know why arch can't detect/use the BT adapter.
afaik, this laptop uses the same card for wifi and BT.
I already updated it's UEFI, as it was required, to fix a bug with the installation of Windows 10 or newer, and also some distros.
the laptop was using KDE plasma, but rn it's running windows 10, as I'm trying to figure out this issue, before fully installing Arch alone on the drive.

[tiny oracle]

have you tried installing linux firmware? you may have the driver loaded but not the firmware, i fixed my intel ax210 not letting me use its bluetooth that way

[stable mason]

afaik it was installed last time

for now, I can only live boot into arch based isos, as the laptop only has windows installed

but I plan to install arch again on it, after profiling some irs files off it, and ofc, figuring out this weird issue with the bluetooth

on windows, installing the bluetooth drivers provided by Lenovo and enabling the bluetooth discovery, make it work

I can try live booting into an arch based iso and check if the package you mention is listed and installed

[tiny oracle]

if possible can you check what wifi card you have

[stable mason]

ofc, lemme provide further info

[stable mason]

lemme boot the laptop to give you the detailed hardware info

oh, I don't think that there's something wrong with the UEFI settings. but, I did disabled fast boot just in case

I'll still send the UEFI settings

[stable mason]

the info you asked for

[tiny oracle]

broadcom

[stable mason]

it's what I got here

need to figure out what's wrong

[stable mason]

so, any ideas?

[tiny oracle]

uhh there's a firmware thing i think

bcm43xx

[stable mason]

I can boot into the live iso for now

[tiny oracle]

try that

[stable mason]

I can't install arch yet, as I'm getting some data off windows before doing it

also this issue

so lemme boot off a live arch based iso

[tiny oracle]

i had an old hp laptop with a b43 card and that let it work

so perhaps youll have the same success

[stable mason]

I can look for bcm43xx on my other laptop with arch tho

[stable mason]

what I found

when doing yay bcm43

[tiny oracle]

is it not in pacman?

[stable mason]

nope

yay looks on arch and aur repos

[tiny oracle]

try linux-firmware just in case

[stable mason]

lemme try

[stable mason]

meanwhile it boots, I found this
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Broadcom_wireless

will try what wiki says

[stable mason]

it's already installed on the live iso

bluetooth and wifi don't work tho

@tiny oracle info from the live iso

from my understanding, arch may be loading the wrong drivers for this laptop

what I can do, is to finish fetching the data from windows, install arch, then try to do what wiki suggests, about loading the proper driver

this post is also helping me
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=274374

as I managed to figure out what driver is the kernel using

kernel reports that it's using r8169

I'll finish what I'm doing with windows, then I'll install arch so we can figure out the issue

[stable mason]

here's more relevant info

I just noticed that, windows uses the BC43xx driver

[stable mason]

well, after a clean install of arch, there's no wifi or BT, so this is definitely a driver issue @tiny oracle

[stable mason]

ok, after digging on the web, installing broadcom-bt-firmware-git and broadcom-wl solved the issue

[Solved] Bluetooth not working at all on vanilla Arch but works fine with Windows 7/8/10

it requires a reboot after installing, so the modules are loaded

broadcom-bt-firmware-git is only available on the chaotic aur

[stable mason]

I still need to test with other kernels, as I used the regular Linux kernel for Arch

[stable mason]

Thanks @tiny oracle for the help

[viscid iron]

n25na@zenith ~> received a thank you cookie!

[tiny oracle]

np :3

[stable mason]

I'll write down this on my repo for anyone who owns the same laptop and needs to fix wifi and Bluetooth

Because everything else just works

[mental cobalt]

Me being able to run parabola OS and still use bluetooth (disnt test the quality though)

[stable mason]

You seem to be looking for #urandom