Fixing Bluetooth on a Toshiba with Ubuntu

I’ve been running Ubuntu Linux on my Toshiba laptop. One of the few things that did not work initially was the internal Bluetooth adapter. Ubuntu knew it was there: it shows in Device Manager as “Platform Device (bluetooth)”. But all the utilities behaved as if no Bluetooth adapter was available.

It looked like a driver problem so I ferreted around looking for a driver. That wasn’t it though. The problem is simply that by default the Bluetooth adapter is turned off. It can only be turned on in software using a Toshiba utility. Toshiba does not provide this for Linux, but fortunately it has been reverse engineered. So the solution is to install toshset, which you can do easily from Synaptic Package Manager. Then you open a terminal and type:

sudo toshset -bluetooth on

and it all starts working. I installed gnome-bluetooth and successfully sent files to and from my mobile phone (Samsung i600).

Not difficult once you know; but it wasn’t obvious what to do after the initial install failed to give working Bluetooth. The pain of being in the minority.

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27 thoughts on “Fixing Bluetooth on a Toshiba with Ubuntu”

  1. solomon@ubuntu:~$ cd /etc/init.d
    solomon@ubuntu:/etc/init.d$ sudo nano tosh-bluetooth
    [sudo] password for solomon:
    solomon@ubuntu:/etc/init.d$ sudo chmod 755 tosh-bluetooth
    solomon@ubuntu:/etc/init.d$ sudo update-rc.d tosh-bluetooth defaults
    update-rc.d: warning: /etc/init.d/tosh-bluetooth missing LSB information
    update-rc.d: see
    Adding system startup for /etc/init.d/tosh-bluetooth …
    /etc/rc0.d/K20tosh-bluetooth -> ../init.d/tosh-bluetooth
    /etc/rc1.d/K20tosh-bluetooth -> ../init.d/tosh-bluetooth
    /etc/rc6.d/K20tosh-bluetooth -> ../init.d/tosh-bluetooth
    /etc/rc2.d/S20tosh-bluetooth -> ../init.d/tosh-bluetooth
    /etc/rc3.d/S20tosh-bluetooth -> ../init.d/tosh-bluetooth
    /etc/rc4.d/S20tosh-bluetooth -> ../init.d/tosh-bluetooth
    /etc/rc5.d/S20tosh-bluetooth -> ../init.d/tosh-bluetooth
    solomon@ubuntu:/etc/init.d$ sudo ./tosh-bluetooth start
    required kernel toshiba support not enabled.
    solomon@ubuntu:/etc/init.d$

    This is what showed up on my toshiba qosmio f60.. cant find any way of using bluetooth or wifi… Using ubuntu for nearly 3 months.. couldn find anything that helped on the internet… somebody got a better idea???

  2. I can sympathise with you here… is there a GUI way to “recompile the kernel with Toshiba support”… because I am having the kernel problem too and I do not know how to recompile the kernel!

    Using Linux Mint 12.

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