# HELP - What replaced bluetoothctl?

## Moriah

I had to travel out of town this week, and threw my laptop and bluetooth mouse into my briefcase and left.  When I got to my destination, I was unable to connect to my bluetooth mouse because the program I had been using, bluetoothctl, had gotten "updated away".    :Evil or Very Mad: 

I assume some update to the bluez stuff has replaced it with something else, but I know not what.

The bluetooth support in Linux has always been marginal at best, but at least with bluetoothctl, I was able to use my mouse when I was out of the office.  I normally have my laptop plugged into a "real" keyboard, wired mouse, and a big desktop monitor, but on the road I just use the bare laptop and a bluetooth mouse.  I am now stuck using the stupid little tappy pad on the laptop, which is awful.    :Sad: 

Can anyone tell me what replaced bluetoothctl, and how to set it up and use it?

Thanks!

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## fedeliallalinea

Command bluetoothctl is not removed

```
$ equery b bluetoothctl

 * Searching for bluetoothctl ... 

net-wireless/bluez-5.43-r1 (/usr/bin/bluetoothctl)
```

You have readline use flag activated on bluez package?

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## Moriah

OK, I did the emerge for the same version of bluez you mentioned.  Now I have a bluetoothctl I can execute, but it cannot find any bluetooth controllers.  There is no man bluetoothctl nor man bluez.  Is the any documentation anywhere?  Are there configuration files I need to set up?

Running bluetoothctl and typing help give commands for bluetoothctl, but no information about any files.  I know the bluetooth hardware is there because the mouse worked before.  I guess I could boot into windoze and see if the mouse will work.

lsusb gives the following:

```

Bus 001 Device 005: ID 0a5c:21e6 Broadcom Corp. BCM20702 Bluetooth 4.0 [ThinkPad]

```

So the hardware is there.

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## Roman_Gruber

Have you checked your kernel, also the staging section?

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## Moriah

It used to work just fine,but I had not used it for probably over 6 months or so, and I think some update bit-rotted it away.  I even tried installing the version 4 bluez, but could not get that to work either.

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## Ant P.

 *Moriah wrote:*   

> There is no man bluetoothctl nor man bluez.  Is the any documentation anywhere?

 

Nope. Welcome to the Bluetooth circle of hell. It's always been like this  :Wink: 

Start by checking `rfkill list bluetooth` (or you can do `head /sys/class/rfkill/*/uevent` if you don't have that installed).

bluetoothctl prefers colour-coding the prompt text instead of giving useful diagnostics; it'll be blue *if* bluez is running and it detects a device. bluez itself sometimes likes to crash too.

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## Moriah

Yes, I know its always  been a royal mess.  I have been using a bluetooth mouse under gentoo since 2009.  I don't use bluetooth for anything else, although I did try using it for audio years ago.  Audio works, so does the mouse, but if you move the mouse while listening to audio, the audio breaks up.  Must be a bandwidth limitation, or the priorities are wrong for the mouse HID and audio.  Audio should be higher, but not so high as to cripple the mouse either.  I now use an external bluetooth audio transmitter plugged into my headphone jack to send audio to my headphones.  I do not use a microphone on my computer.  Its just my paranoid security mentality...    :Surprised: 

But in the past, I have always been able to get the mouse to work.  I guess I'm just not trying hard enough yet.    :Evil or Very Mad: 

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