While trying to connect a Bluetooth device to my Asus Vivobook 14 Flip running under Debian Trixie, I noticed that Bluetooth did not work. Here’s an easy way to fix it.

Diagnoses

What kind of device do we have?

$ lspci | grep Network
00:14.3 Network controller: Intel Corporation BE201 320MHz (rev 10)
$ sudo lspci -v -s 00:14.3
00:14.3 Network controller: Intel Corporation BE201 320MHz (rev 10)
	DeviceName: Onboard - Ethernet
	Subsystem: Intel Corporation Device 00e4
	Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 18, IOMMU group 10
	Memory at 3014328000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
00:14.3 Network controller: Intel Corporation BE201 320MHz (rev 10)
	DeviceName: Onboard - Ethernet
	Subsystem: Intel Corporation Device 00e4
	Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 18, IOMMU group 10
	Memory at 3014328000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
	Capabilities: [c8] Power Management version 3
	Capabilities: [d0] MSI: Enable- Count=1/1 Maskable- 64bit+
	Capabilities: [40] Express Root Complex Integrated Endpoint, IntMsgNum 0
	Capabilities: [80] MSI-X: Enable+ Count=32 Masked-
	Capabilities: [100] Latency Tolerance Reporting
	Kernel driver in use: iwlwifi
	Kernel modules: iwlwifi

(sudo is only necessary to also get the capabilities listed.)

It is a PCIe networking card, supporting both WiFi-7 and Bluetooth. With the Trixie standard kernel (linux-image-6.12.48+deb13-amd64 package), installing /boot/vmlinuz-6.12.48+deb13-amd64 and friends, it only supports WiFi, even though Intel claims to support the BE201 starting at Linux 6.11+.

Listing modules also seems OK at first glance:

$ lsmod | grep 'bt[^r]'
btusb                  81920  0
btrtl                  36864  1 btusb
btintel                73728  1 btusb
btbcm                  24576  1 btusb
btmtk                  32768  1 btusb
bluetooth            1097728  44 btrtl,btmtk,btintel,btbcm,bnep,btusb,rfcomm
usbcore               425984  14 xhci_hcd,usbnet,snd_usb_audio,usbhid,snd_usbmidi_lib,btmtk,usblp,r8153_ecm,uvcvideo,btusb,xhci_pci,cdc_ether,r8152

There is a btintel («Bluetooth Intel») module available and loaded, but just for USB. Our BE201 is connected over PCIe, however, so it probably requires a different driver. And there is one, called btintel_pcie; this looks great.

$ sudo modprobe btintel_pcie

… does work and loads the module. However, it does not find anything to attach to. So this seems to go nowhere. Usage remains at 0.

$ lsmod | grep btintel
btintel_pcie           49152  0
btintel                73728  2 btintel_pcie,btusb
bluetooth            1097728  47 btrtl,btintel_pcie,btmtk,btintel,btbcm,bnep,btusb,rfcomm

Searching the web revealed instructions to compile the kernel, which I tried to avoid.

Solution: Kernel from Debian-Backports

Debian also maintains a list of backports, newer packages than what the stable Trixie distribution supports. The advice is to use it sparingly. But as Bluetooth is an essential requirement for me, I wanted it to work.

So I created a file called /etc/apt/sources.list.d/debian_backports.sources with the following contents:

Types: deb deb-src
URIs: http://deb.debian.org/debian
Suites: trixie-backports
Components: main
Enabled: yes
Signed-By: /usr/share/keyrings/debian-archive-keyring.gpg

Followed by the following commands:

$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install -t trixie-backports linux-image-amd64

This instructs the Debian package manager to look for a Linux kernel in the trixie-backports repository. As of this writing, this installed linux-image-6.16.3+deb13-amd64.

A reboot later, I had working Bluetooth! Hooray!

My previous posts to get my Asus Vivobook 14 Flip to run under Linux