Bluetooth LE and Ubuntu 16.04, sometimes works, other times not

Question

I come from Fedora 22 and 23, because it had support for my BLE mouse (Microsoft Designer Mouse). I decided to switch to the "stable" 16.04 because I like Unity more than GNOME.

To make my mouse at least pair with my PC, I had to remove 50-bluetooth-hci-auto-poweron.rules and uncomment autoenable=true from /etc/bluetooth/main.conf (as indicated here).

Sometimes when I boot up the computer, the mouse works (although it stops working after a while), and sometimes doesn't. For example, today I restarted my PC 10 times without success. Yesterday, it worked after 3 reboots. Please help me, this is really getting annoying.

$ lsusb
Atheros Communications, Inc. AR3012 Bluetooth 4.0

$ dmesg
Bluetooth: BNEP (Ethernet Emulation) ver 1.3
Bluetooth: BNEP filters: protocol multicast
Bluetooth: BNEP socket layer initialized
Bluetooth: RFCOMM TTY layer initialized
Bluetooth: RFCOMM socket layer initialized
Bluetooth: RFCOMM ver 1.11
Bluetooth: hci0 command 0x0c52 tx timeout

$ bluetoothctl
[bluetooth]# info CC:E4:52:E7:9B:9E 
Device CC:E4:52:E7:9B:9E
  Name: Designer Mouse
  Alias: Designer Mouse
  Appearance: 0x03c2
  Icon: input-mouse
  Paired: yes
  Trusted: yes
  Blocked: no
  Connected: no
  LegacyPairing: no
  Modalias: usb:v045Ep0805d0100

[bluetooth]# connect CC:E4:52:E7:9B:9E 
Attempting to connect to CC:E4:52:E7:9B:9E
Failed to connect: org.bluez.Error.Failed

It would be great if there was a way to know what differs from the Fedora configuration, because on that system it worked just perfectly.

Solution

I solved replacing the gnome bluetooth default indicator with blueman (which is even better and has more options, I really wonder why it is not default)

cd /usr/share/upstart/sessions

sudo mv indicator-bluetooth.conf indicator-bluetooth.conf.old

sudo apt install blueman

Then I restarted and reassociated the mouse. Now it works flawlessly at any time.

Comments

[Marc]

Unfortunately it stopped working for me, no matter what I do, what did you do to connect the mouse? Did you follow the procedure I linked (deleting that file and enabling autoenable)?