How to Fix Kali Linux Bluetooth issues

How to Fix Kali Linux Bluetooth issues

Does your Kali machine have issues or problems to do with Bluetooth?

You are probably going to Settings and turning Bluetooth On, but annoyingly, the toggle button returns to Off, as if you did not just do anything. For others the toggle button accepts to change to On, but nothing displays inside the Bluetooth window, again, as if you did not just do anything, and additionally for these cases, if you exit the Bluetooth window or close Settings and then return to Bluetooth settings, the toggle is back to Off. Damn annoying!

 

This article highlights some of the ways to fix the problems;

Fix 1: Enable/Activate Bluetooth Manually in Terminal

This is the most basic fix that works for most.

[Step 1: Check if you have Bluetooth installed in your Kali machine via ‘apt’]

apt show bluetooth

If this command returned results with certain information/flags, for instance “Package:”, “Version:”, “Priority:”, “Section:”, “Source:”, “Maintainer:”, “Installed-Size:”, “Depends:”, “Suggests:”, “Homepage:”, “Tag:”, “Download-Size:”, “APT-Sources:” && “Description:”!, then you are good to go. Continue with Fix 1. If you got that Bluetooth is not installed in your Kali machine, you need to check other fixed that are provided after Fix 1.

[Step 2: Check the Status of Bluetooth as a Service]

systemctl status bluetooth

Here, you are looking for an ‘active’ status in the results of the above command. The results should contain “Loaded:“, “Active:” and “Docs:” flags.
Our focus here is with the “Active:” flag, which should return an ‘active (running)‘ status, if Bluetooth is running. If it is not, as expected in this case, the results will have an ‘inactive (dead)‘ status. We thus have to manually change this status.

 

[Step 3: Activating Bluetooth]

systemctl start bluetooth

Just like you usually start any service in Kali/Debian, you use the keyword ‘service’ followed by the action you want to take, for instance, ‘start’ and ‘stop’, and finally the service you are targeting when performing the specified action.
You should not expect any output in Terminal if this command goes through successfully. It silently performs the intended task and then returns to the location you were working with in Terminal before running the command. It almost looks like you did nothing, but be fooled not, as this is the core of this fix!

[Step 4: Check the Status of Bluetooth now]

systemctl status bluetooth

If the command from the previous step went through successfully, you expect to get an ‘active (running)‘ status now in the “Active:” flag.
The results of this command will have flags similar to the time we ran it first in Step 2, with additional flags. The flags now will be; “Loaded:”, “Active:”, “Docs:”, “Main PID:”, “Status:”, “Tasks:”, “Memory:”, “CPU:” and “CGroup:”.

You are now good to go! Just to confirm the Fix worked, open Settings and navigate to Bluetooth settings. Turn the toggle button to On for Bluetooth and your Kali machine should now start searching for the nearby Bluetooth devices. Also, for the record, closing Bluetooth settings now should not actually close Bluetooth or change the toggle button to off when you return to Settings.

 

Fix 2: Install Bluetooth

If the results of Step 1 in Fix 1 showed that Bluetooth is not installed, you could not continue with the subsequent steps. This fix is for you. It is a simple as you only need to install Bluetooth. Use the following commands;

apt-get install bluetooth

or

sudo apt-get install bluetooth

Alternatively, you can download Bluetooth manually from the provided repository in Debian packages, depending on the version of Debian, that is “Jessie“, “Stretch” or “Buster“.

Buster: https://packages.debian.org/buster/all/bluetooth/download
Stretch: https://packages.debian.org/stretch/all/bluetooth/download
Jessie: https://packages.debian.org/jessie/all/bluetooth/download

Note that Buster is the newest Release for Debian followed by Stretch as we backdate.

The package you will get from the download is a *.deb file which you can install from directly using the ‘dpkg‘ command and package manager, like;

dpkg -i /path/to/*.deb

or

dpkg --install /path/to/*.deb

Another alternative for Linux is using the latest modules provided by BlueZ, at http://www.bluez.org/download/. BlueZ provides support for Linux Bluetooth core protocols and layers for generally all Linux distros, but more specifically for; Debian GNU/Linux, Ubuntu Linux, Fedora Core / Red Hat Linux, OpenSuSE / SuSE Linux, Mandrake Linux, Gentoo Linux and Chrome OS.

 

NOTE:// After successfuly installing Bluetooth in your machine, you might want to activate it before using it. This is because, after installing Bluetooth, yo might now encounter the issue we solved in Fix 1 above. Therefore, you might want to follow the steps in Fix 1 above after the installation.

 

Fix 3: Last option

If for whatever reason the above two fixes did not work for you you can try Uninstalling Bluetooth and then Re-Installing it. After successfully getting Bluetooth in your machine, you might want to also go back to Fix 1 to activate Bluetooth, due to reasons presented in the Fix 2 Note!

 

How to Fix Kali Linux Bluetooth issues
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