Sunday, April 17, 2011

Debian 6 with Atheros 3011 ath3k USB Bluetooth Dongle

I picked up a USB Asus Bluetooth dongle from Fry's, and found that it didn't work on my Debian 6 amd64 box.

Here's how to get it working:

Grab the firmware:
$ git clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/dwmw2/linux-firmware.git
Copy the ath3k firmware to /lib/firmware:
$ sudo cp linux-firmware/ath3k-1.fw /lib/firmware
Grab compat-wireless:
$ wget http://www.orbit-lab.org/kernel/compat-wireless-2.6-stable/v2.6.39/compat-wireless-2.6.39-rc1-3-s.tar.bz2

Compile compat-wirless:
$ tar jxfv  http://www.orbit-lab.org/kernel/compat-wireless-2.6-stable/v2.6.39/compat-wireless-2.6.39-rc1-3-s.tar.bz2
$ cd compat-wireless-2.6.39-rc1-3-s
$ make
$ sudo make install

Plug in your USB dongle, and see if it works:
$ sudo hciconfig
You should see something like:

hci0:   Type: BR/EDR  Bus: USB
        BD Address: 00:02:72:xx:xx:xx  ACL MTU: 1022:8  SCO MTU: 121:3
        UP RUNNING PSCAN
        RX bytes:1292 acl:0 sco:0 events:39 errors:0
        TX bytes:1602 acl:0 sco:0 commands:37 errors:0
Posted by at

3 comments:

  1. DamnatedJune 5, 2011 at 1:12 PM

    I have been trying to make my built in Arthos bluetooth device to work for about 5 months now, and with your help, I did it in about 30 minutes (~29 of that was compiling).
    Thank you very, very much for making this post.

    ReplyDelete
  2. TaylorJune 26, 2012 at 8:17 PM

    For fellow Googlers you may want to update the guide - it's just a one line command now:

    sudo apt-get install firmware-atheros
    sudo reboot

    Thanks!

    ReplyDelete
  3. AnonymousSeptember 30, 2012 at 10:44 AM

    And you may also need to run 'hciconfig hci0 up' if the second line in output of hciconfig is 'DOWN'

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)