Get Your Bluetooth Working: Arch Linux Install AX210 Bluetooth Driver

Alright, guys, so today I messed around with getting my AX210’s Bluetooth driver working on my Arch Linux system. It wasn’t as straightforward as I hoped, so I figured I’d share my little adventure here.

First off, I noticed that the Bluetooth wasn’t even showing up. bluetoothctl command was not working as expected. I mean, the controller was nowhere to be found, even though rfkill listed it as unblocked. Weird, right? I already had the bluez package installed and up to date, so that wasn’t the issue.

Then I had this idea to install blueman. It’s a GUI tool for Bluetooth, and I thought maybe it could give me some hints. True enough, as soon as I opened it, it told me that the Bluetooth service wasn’t running or enabled properly. Okay, progress!

So I went ahead and enabled the Bluetooth service. You know, the usual systemctl stuff. After that, I made sure the daemon was up and running.

• First, I enabled Bluetooth by typing sudo systemctl enable bluetooth.
• Then, I started Bluetooth by typing sudo systemctl start bluetooth.

I also found out that the Bluetooth chip, AX210, is connected via USB, and only the Wi-Fi part is on PCIe. I’m not sure if that’s important, but it’s something I learned.

I did a little digging around and found some folks suggesting to check with the system manufacturer about support for this chip on Linux. But come on, who has time for that? I wanted a quick fix.

Someone mentioned btintel, which is apparently for Intel Bluetooth. So I checked if it was loaded and used modprobe to load it if it wasn’t. Turns out, btintel wasn’t the main problem here. However, I just tried it.

• Check if the btusb module is running by typing lsmod grep btusb.
• If it was not running. Load the driver by typing sudo modprobe btusb.

Oh, and I use KDE, so there’s this thing called bluedevil which is like a Bluetooth manager. I made sure that was installed too. Plus, I learned that the Bluetooth stack on Linux is called BlueZ. Good to know, I guess.

But then I reboot my computer, then, guess what? Bluetooth was working fine after that! I don’t know the exact reason why it started working, but hey, I’m not complaining! It is just working!

So yeah, that’s my story of wrestling with the AX210 Bluetooth driver on Arch Linux. It wasn’t pretty, but I got it working in the end. If any of you run into a similar issue, maybe some of these steps will help you out. Cheers!