Hi dear community. After some research online and distro hopping on VMs I landed on Kubuntu 18.10. I really like KDE and how behaves, the possibility of a minimal installation and some other stuff.
Yesterday I decided to install in on my laptop but I’m now facing some issues making everything run the way it should. The biggest problems at the moment are the fingerprint reader and the bluetooth.
I have an RT3290 wifi and bluetooth card in this system and no matter what driver i tried I can’t get the bluetooth to work, despite others succeding on the internet. To be honest I don’t know how to remove drivers so maybe I made a mess of them because the first driver wasn’t working and I moved on to another hoping it would work (they’re both rtbth drivers).
Regarding the fingerprint reader it’s a Validity Sensor 138a:0018 which has no further naming after updating the data of lsusb and, looks like, no support either from the Linux community. I don’t know how to start with that.
I’m familiar with the command line and can work with it (even if I don’t know what to do the help command it’s always there for me).
P.S. I’m dual booting with secure boot and for whatever reason the Ubuntu entries in the boot menu of my notebook are multiplying. I installed Kubuntu alongside Windows so it has it’s own efi partition and didn’t interfere with the previous Windows installation. So much so that if I don’t enter the boot menu the PC boots straigh into Windows which is fine for me. Just clarifying the situation.
Start off by checking that the daemons are up and running for bluetooth & the fingerprint sensor.
systemctl start bluetooth
systemctl status bluetooth
systemctl start fprintd
systemctl status fprintd
As for the grub entries, when you install a new kernel, usually via an update, the old ones aren’t deleted. So that if you run into i.e. some driver issues you can just boot to an older kernel instead.
Nothing’s running so I tried cleaning all the btrth stuff I installed.
I didn’t install anything regarding the fingerprint reader, one thing at the time to fix. I’m already really lost.
They’re not GRUB entries but boot menu entries. I have secure boot enabled and had to set password two times for the Nvidia drivers and one for the btrth.
I don’t have a clue really. Also I need the bluetooth to work because I have my laptop on a stand far from me and I need my bluetooth keyboard connected.
I did an apt purge on the drivers I installed following THIS guide I found online. Also in another guide I found a deb package from the same repo but with a slightly different guide. I don’t have it anymore but it didn’t work. Launching modprobe rtbth always gave me a fail, no matter what I did to fix it (reboot the machine, turning on and off the wifi and so on)
P.S. THIS is the other guide I followed and it didn’t work
When I run it again it says “file already exists” and the terminal just hangs without responding. This is what it did before when I tried one method and the other one immediatly after without purging or anything.
Well you enrolled the new key when you installed the driver the first time so it shouldn’t be secure boot messing with you, but that’s easy to check by disabling it and seeing if it starts working tho
I don’t want to disable it because I’m dual booting with Windows at the moment and I don’t want to mess that up to be honest. Also I see one entry adding every time I do installation or stuff like that
I already removed everything and when you asked me to post screenshots of the terminal I installed everything again. This won’t work unfortunately. thanks for being so patient and helpful!
Real weird, check if the kernel has something to say
dmesg | grep rtb
Doubt its a hardware fault if it works fine on windows, guess you machine is just cursed lol. That would just leave with swapping out your nic (for an intel one) or using another bluetooth dongle.
Sucks, but i’m out of ideas at this point regarding your bt…
