Hey All,
I’m a first-time caller long time listener but wanted to share an experience I had over the past week with my new laptop. Recently with working from home and the inability to split my work and relax space, I got a laptop that I could have elsewhere in the house that I can do more coding on.
TL;DR: With an Intel AX201 or AX200 on Linux you may need to disable co-existence mode directly in your OS in order to use Bluetooth effectively. This can be done by running the following command:
sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/iwlwifi-opt.conf <<< “options iwlwifi bt_coex_active=N”
In my search for a new laptop, I had decided on a Razer Blade Base (2020). Originally was going to do a Stealth, but the keyboard small shift key on the right-hand side was a no go. I picked this one up and it has a second M.2 slot so I wanted to dual boot Windows and Ubuntu.
I like Windows for still doing some of my day to day work since a lot of my clients are in the Windows world, but Ubuntu so I could start learning to code and I’m super familiar with it. I’ve only been into using Linux more in-depth a few years but I wanted to spend most of my time in it on this one.
Anyway, this issue started when I did my first install on my new M.2 with Ubuntu 20.04. I have a set of AirPods and wanted to connect them to listen to music while I was coding. I attempted to connect and couldn’t connect. I assumed it was an issue with my headphones, but was able to connect with a few other devices.
The first thing I attempted to do was trying to connect with the Blueman package. Once installed I pulled up Blueman-manager, but it would let me trust the device however couldn’t connect. Wondering if it was a weird incompatibility I attempted to connect my Bluetooth mouse and got a similar issue.
After this, I restarted service a few times and finally opened up bluetoothctl to attempt to connect. Any device I connected to would just give me a BlueZ error. I would only say BlueZ error in progress. I attempted to remove and update all packages. I tried removing and reinstalling all PulseAudio. I went in and edited the bluetooth.conf to not do dual-mode and still had the issue.
At this point, I wondered if there was an issue with OS. So to test this I wiped and tried again with 18.04 and was getting a similar issue. Seeing other issues with this I tried all the same troubleshooting steps. Had the exact same results. Finally, I decided to see if there was a firmware issue and updated that. Honestly, the first time done on the Linux side but was super easy. Still ran into the same issue.
All in all, I had tried for 3 days on and off to troubleshoot and was very frustrated as everything that was suggest had been tried. So dismayed I decided to update back to 20.04 and just suck it up that there may just be an issue with Bluetooth on this laptop. Then I remembered maybe it’s the fact it’s a dual boot issue. I loaded into Windows.
Opening up I was able to pair in mere seconds. So not a problem for Windows. I removed it swapped over Ubuntu and still got the same problem. Finally, I decided to change my google-fu searches to focus on Intel Adapter Bluetooth rather than just generic Bluetooth issues. I tried with my model for the card and without my model.
Finally, after trying a few more things that honestly didn’t do anything and aren’t worth mentioning. I found an article for Intel AC adapters that states Intel’s combo chips have co-existence on by default and is known to cause issues trying to connect when enable. So I ran the following command.
sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/iwlwifi-opt.conf <<< “options iwlwifi bt_coex_active=N”
I disabled it did a reboot and in mere seconds it was able to connect.
This is such a random issue, but I figured someone else might run into something similar, and hopefully, this has helped solve this issue.
Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
John T.