Callum Wilkinson sent the following email (abridged):
Hi Steve
I appreciate your articles on the AI X1 Pro, they are very interesting and have been helpful as I’m fairly new to Linux. I read about your issue with Bluetooth & Linux which you resolved by using a newer kernel.
I’m guessing you dislike Windows, but I hope you will offer some advice to my problem. I am dual booting Windows and linux, but I keep having an annoying issue with Bluetooth. Every time I swap between Windows and Linux, I have to forget the Bluetooth connection and then re-pair the device. It’s annoying. Any ideas how to fix this?
Hi Callum
I don’t dislike anyone for using a particular operating system. I’m certainly not an advocate of Windows, but I’m also a pragmatist.
For the AI X1 Pro, I actually set up dual booting on the machine so I can test the AI X1 Pro’s NPU (I’ve not discovered a single working app for Linux that uses this NPU).
I got the same issue as you regarding Bluetooth. The reason for the Bluetooth issue is a bit complicated. Let me explain as concisely as I can.
The problem is that Windows and Linux use a different hardware identifier (MAC address) they send to the Bluetooth device. The pairing key is created and stored by the operating system, not with the device itself. What happens is that after you’ve rebooted from Linux to Windows (or vice versa) the operating system has a different pairing key created by the other operating system. Hence you have to forget the device and re-pair.
There are a few solutions to fix this. I’ll document an automatic way of fixing the issue.
- Pair the Bluetooth device in Windows.
- Reboot into Linux (stay in Linux forever — just joking, it’s good for morale).
- Install the package bt-dualboot. If’you’re running an Arch-based distribution, there’s a package in the Arch User Repository. Else, install it with pipx (not pip).
- Mount the Windows partition. This doesn’t need to be a permanent mount (e.g. in fstab), but something as simple as mounting the Windows partition in a file manager (e.g. Dolphin). It doesn’t matter where Windows is mounted to.
- Run the command
$ sudo bt-dualboot --sync-all --no-backup
When you next reboot to Windows, the Bluetooth device should automatically work.
One thing I’ve noticed is that after booting into Windows, and then booting into Linux, the Bluetooth controller is not found. If I reboot again, the Bluetooth controller is found, and the Bluetooth device works fine. Rebooting again isn’t actually necessary, as the controller is found when unloading and loading the btusb module.
$ sudo modprobe -r btusb && sudo modprobe btusb
Put that command in a start up file or an alias.
I hope that helps.
Complete list of articles in this series:
| Minisforum AI X1 Pro | |
|---|---|
| Introduction | Introduction to the series and interrogation of the machine |
| Benchmarks | Benchmarking the Minisforum AI X1 Pro |
| Power | Testing and comparing the power consumption |
| Jan | ChatGPT without privacy concerns |
| ComfyUI | Generate video, images, 3D, audio with AI |
| AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 Cores | Primary (Zen 5) and Secondary Cores (Zen 5c) |
| Gerbil | Run large language models locally |
| Neural Processing Unit (NPU) | Introduction |
| Gaia | Run LLM Agents |
| Noise | Comparing the machine's noise with other mini PCs |
| Bluetooth | Fixing Bluetooth when dual-booting |