Disable Bluetooth on Ubuntu 7.10

By | 2007/11/24

I’ve been troubleshooting some oddities on my machine this afternoon and one thing I’ve done to try and find some conflicts is remove some often unneeded kernel modules.  I thought I would outline quickly how to disable and permanently remove the bluetooth module for those that don’t use it.  I realize I don’t think I’ve used the bluetooth system on my machine for months, so I may as well just disable the module permanently.

Permanently disable the Bluetooth module

To disable the bluetooth module from being loaded at boot time we’ll need to add it to the system module blacklist.  Basically your system keeps a list of modules that need to be blacklisted for various reasons, often those that cause problems, and we’ll add this to that list.

sudo vim /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

append this line to the end of the file:

blacklist hci_usb

You also may want to turn off the bluetooth services within the desktop as well.  Granted they shouldn’t be able to do anything if the module support is not loaded underneath, but it doesn’t hurt.

Disable the bluetooth services

System > Preferences > Sessions should have a listing for the bluetooth service. You may want to uncheck this box or even remove the listing altogether.

System > Administration > Services also contains a listing for starting up the bluetooth system at boot time.  You may also want to uncheck this box.

Between blacklisting the module and removing the services from starting up this should disable the bluetooth system on Ubuntu.  If you don’t use it, don’t load it.  It is just going to take up a bit more of your resources and, for those with laptops, will save power as will if you often go unplugged.

7 thoughts on “Disable Bluetooth on Ubuntu 7.10

  1. DeFrysk

    Did you not forget to also blacklist the “bluetooth” module ?
    With your suggestion the Bluetooth module is still loaded.

  2. infodroid

    I know this sounds obvious, but it might be worth stating to check your BIOS if you can disable bluetooth from there!

  3. Piers

    Any hints on how to do the “Disable the bluetooth services” section in KDE? I keep seeing the same info everywhere on how to do it in Gnome, but no-one seems to mention the KDE version. Thx!

  4. abed

    i need to stop bluetooth services from the terminal because my pc wont start
    it stops at starting bluetooth services

    so i start in recovery mode
    plzz how to disable from terminal

    thanks

  5. Philip

    As @abed
    My Gutsy install kept falling down on my new notebook at *Starting Bluetooth services.

    I discovered that inserting fb=false (F6 on boot screen of CD) that I was able to install Gutsy.
    Amazing! (after two weeks of trying on a HP Pavillion dv6558ea Intel Core duo, Vista Ultimate).
    I need to keep Vista at least until I get everything up and running, so it’s a dual boot install, disk partitioned with live GParted CD.
    However when I reboot, I get the
    *Starting Bluetooth services
    failure again. And as I can’t boot into Gutsy, So like abed above, I don’t see how I can follow your excellent tutorial when I can’t get to the terminal.
    I’d like Bluetooth, but I can sure live without it now. I’m certainly blue in the face with it.
    Thanks for all the good writing.

  6. Ondrej

    Philip: I have the same problem. Do you know how to fix it? I am not able to start my linux… :~(

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