So I’ve been try to get my PS3 controllers working via bluetooth with Linux for testing with my game. This led to a very frustrating hour or two of troubleshooting.
The real problem started when I was attempting to pair the controller, and my system hung. It hung hard. I was unable to get to a terminal or anything, so… Raising Skinny Elephants Is Utterly Boring… and I was logging back into the system.
That’s when I noticed… my bluetooth was gone from the system tray. The system claimed no adapter was found when I went to system settings. :\
Now, let’s fast forward ahead through two hours of me trying hotkeys to disable/re-enable the adapter, re-installing all the bluetooth packages, trying ACPI options, and echoing values straight to /sys/bus/usb/devices/… in vain. Do you know what the problem was?
Somehow the executable bit was no longer on /usr/sbin/bluetoothd!!! I can’t think of anything I did that could have possibly caused that… so there must have been some other update I took while updating my system to nvidia-337 drivers earlier in the day. And re-installing should have fixed it anyway, unless it’s broken in the ‘bluetooth’ package in the Ubuntu repositories.
What a fiasco that was.