Bluetooth bluez and blueman-applet Xubuntu 18.04

Question

I have a basic and fully updated install of Xubuntu 18.04, and bluetooth doesn't work properly. If I try to turn it off in the xfce panel (blueman-applet), nothing happens. If I exit the applet, it of course disappears from the Panel tray but then I am unable to restart bluetooth. (Error: Bluez daemon is not running, blueman-manager cannot continue.)

I have searched here and on SO, tried every suggestion on this thread, but none of them seems to have any effect: https://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-1174624.html

For example, when disabled, if I sudo service bluetooth start, nothing happens. if I sudo bluetoothd, the terminal stops responding and sometimes (but not usually) the bluetooth applet icon returns to the panel tray.

I rarely use bluetooth, so disabling it is an option, but basic functionality would be nice (i.e. the ability to turn bluetooth off/on).

Any suggestions?

Solution

I ran into this problem and fixed it by reinstalling all my bluetooth applications.

sudo apt install --reinstall blueman*
sudo apt install --reinstall bluez*
sudo /etc/init.d/bluetooth restart

It seems the audio and bluetooth systems on ubuntu/linux break every week or two for me, and very often the only solution involves reinstalling everything from scratch and restarting.

Comments

[Geekomancer]

Thank you for your reply, but this didn't seem to have any effect on my system. Still the same error when trying to restart bluetooth. I have already tried re-installing the OS multiple times.

[BLUC]

Is your problem that bluetooth produces sound but you can't turn it off and on reliably, or that you can't get sound output with bluetooth at all? Also, do you happen to have a dual boot installation, or have you had another OS such as Windows/Mac so you can verify if bluetooth is working on one of those?