Arch Linux

beppe

Member

Registered: 2025-11-27

Posts: 1

Bluetooth keyboard not showing up in scan

I've set up bluetooth on my arch install following this wiki page, and it works for some devices, but not for my bluetooth keyboard and i can't figure out how to fix it.

So far i've tried these commands from the wiki post

bluetoothctl
[bluetoothctl]> select MYCONTROLLER 
[bluetoothctl]> power on
[bluetoothctl]> scan on
[bluetoothctl]> devices

I left that running for a while, trying devices periodically to see if anything shows up but nothing ever did.
I tried checking if the device works/is visible on other bluetooth devices (like my iphone) and it shows up.
I tried seeing if i can get anything to show up on the arch machine and it did (my iphone for example).
I also set the agent to KeyboardOnly to test, and it didn't change anything (but somehow also my iphone was able to show up, though maybe that is normal behavior?)

After some searching i found that it might be related to bluetooth low power stuff and tried this command

sudo btmgmt le on

But it didn't help either.

Went back to the arch wiki and looked through the debugging and issues section, also found a section related to devices not showing up with specifics on low power, tried this:

[bluetoothctl]> power on
[bluetoothctl]> scan menu
[bluetoothctl]> transport le
[bluetoothctl]> back
[bluetoothctl]> scan off
[bluetoothctl]> scan on

But still no luck, tried bluez-deprecated in the same section to get hcitool lescan to work which just gave me this error, and i couldn't find how to fix this

sudo hcitool lescan
Set scan parameters failed: Input/output error

I've also tried rebooting as i've seen someone mention somewhere on the internet that the controllers can get stuck in certain modes, however no luck with that either.

So i've decided to ask for help here and i hope i did it correctly since this is my first time doing so.

Thanks in advance