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BluetoothKeyboard

The following was what we needed to do for a fancy Logitech Bluetooth wireless keyboard. It's ultra-thin, has no number pad, and has a mouse touchpad and volume adjust on the right side.

My roommate cleverly noticed we could select which OS to boot with the keyboard, but by the time Linux (Mint, from Ubuntu 8.10, in this case) reached the login screen, it was no longer functional. After some investigation, we found that if we unplugged it for a time, and then plugged it back in and did the connection procedure, it returned to use.

Note that this is a very different issue than if your bluetooth device is never detected, and I highly doubt this will help you, but please let us know if you have any success.

Fix Procedure

• Edit the first configuration file, which configures the default way of dealing with bluetooth devices :
• gedit /etc/default/bluetooth
• NOTICE! that there is already a note :

 # This setting will switch HID devices (e.g mouse/keyboad) to HCI mode, that is
 # you will have bluetooth functionality from your dongle instead of only HID.
 # Note that not every bluetooth dongle is capable of switching back to HID
 # mode, see http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=355497

• Change HID2HCI_ENABLED=1 to HID2HCI_ENABLED=0
• Leave yourself an extra note. I wrote the following:

 # We're disabling the bottom because we suspect our keyboard does not need it.
 # IF this is a problem in the future, I suspect that we can leave the 
 # 'default' enabled but alter /etc/init.d/bluetooth and leave that off.
 # or possibly the reverse.  Again... I just think it may work..... -kevin

• Edit the second configuration file, which handles bluetooth device recognition during startup. I suspect, as noted above, that this may be the only thing that is necessary for this particular case, but I haven't tested it.
• gedit /etc/init.d/bluetooth
• Change HID2HCI_ENABLED=1 to HID2HCI_ENABLED=0
• Leave yourself an extra note.

 # If you dispute the utility of the following setting, please see the note at /etc/default/bluetooth

Commentary

As the note above mentions, this may not be a great fix for you if you have other bluetooth devices that need that setting. I don't, and I don't know what would. It seems more likely to me that having it only in the init.d folder would work because it is loaded at that point in time and once loaded, the default settings shouldn't interfere. But that's only theory at this point.