Microsoft Arc Touch Mouse doesn't working on Ubuntu 14.04

Question

I bought a brand new Microsoft Arc Touch mouse that uses a Bluetooth SMART (Bluetooth 4.0 BLE for low powered devices).

Altough I can get it paired with no problem at first look. It just doesn't work. On "Bluetooth manager" I can see the device listed with the "Connected" flag off. Additionally, my bluetooth is enabled and I can use it with my Galaxy S5 with no problem (e.g.: sending files) and the mouse works fine on Windows 8.1 as well.

So, I have monitored the syslog when I tried to connect and I got the following messages:

bluetoothd[3081]: Discovery session 0x7f229a5c9960 with :1.86 activated
bluetoothd[3081]: No GATT server found in 3C:77:E6:D4:10:58
bluetoothd[3081]: No GATT server found in 3C:77:E6:D4:10:58
bluetoothd[3081]: Attribute server attach failure!
bluetoothd[3081]: Stopping discovery

I tried finding solutions on forums without success. I don't know what kind of information do you need to answer my question, so just ask and I will be happy to complement it.

Solution

Bluetooth 4 HID devices (like your mouse) require Bluez 5.15 to function. Unfortunetely, on Ubuntu 14.04, Bluez is at version 4.

To update Bluez to version 5, you will have to do the following:

Note: I haven't teseted this and these instructions, and they (while very unlikely) could break your machine due to this being an unofficial PPA.

1. Add this unofficial PPA by opening Terminal and typing sudo add-apt-repository -y ppa:vidplace7/bluez5.

2. sudo apt-get update

3. sudo apt-get install bluez
   For me, dpkg hung when I did this, so I force restarted and ran sudo dpkg --configure -a.

Hope this helps!

_{Source: here}

Comments

[Mjc]

I tried this string and it appears to have broken bluetooth. Is there any guidance for undoing the changes?

[Jota Santos]

Sorry, I did not use that answer as solution. Have you tried to reinstall the previous version of bluez? Have you removed the repository?