bluetoothdebianlighthousesteamvr

How can I get steam vr to connect to the lightouses using my edimax bt-8500 bluetooth in debian 12?


I'm having problems getting Steam VR to recognize my USB Edimax bluetooth adapter 5.0 (BT-8500) in Debian 12:

Operating System: Debian GNU/Linux 12
KDE Plasma Version: 5.27.5
KDE Frameworks Version: 5.103.0
Qt Version: 5.15.8
Kernel Version: 6.1.0-21-amd64 (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: Wayland
Processors: 24 × AMD Ryzen 9 7900X 12-Core Processor
Memory: 61.9 GiB of RAM
Graphics Processor: AMD Radeon Graphics
Manufacturer: ASUS

I'm getting a bluetooth error BT-232 enter image description here

All solutions I've came across was either for Windows or it did not fix the issue.

hciconfig -a
hci0:   Type: Primary  Bus: USB
        BD Address: 08:BE:AC:32:79:62  ACL MTU: 1021:6  SCO MTU: 255:12
        UP RUNNING PSCAN 
        RX bytes:667350 acl:180 sco:0 events:93295 errors:0
        TX bytes:59705735 acl:92843 sco:0 commands:250 errors:0
        Features: 0xff 0xff 0xff 0xfe 0xdb 0xfd 0x7b 0x87
        Packet type: DM1 DM3 DM5 DH1 DH3 DH5 HV1 HV2 HV3 
        Link policy: RSWITCH HOLD SNIFF PARK 
        Link mode: PERIPHERAL ACCEPT 
        Name: '-------'
        Class: 0x7c0104
        Service Classes: Rendering, Capturing, Object Transfer, Audio, Telephony
        Device Class: Computer, Desktop workstation
        HCI Version: 5.1 (0xa)  Revision: 0x9a9
        LMP Version: 5.1 (0xa)  Subversion: 0x8a6b
        Manufacturer: Realtek Semiconductor Corporation (93)  

My suspicion is that Steam VR has no privilege to access the bluetooth adapter and I don't know how to give it the privilege, or Steam VR is not compatible with the 5.1 bluetooth Linux driver included in Debian 12. I've downloaded a bluetooth driver for Linux from the manufacturer page of Edimax but I don't know if it is as simple as just compiling it and installing it. Would that simply override the default bluetooth drivers or do I need to uninstall the current default bluetooth drivers before compiling and installing the Edimax drivers? I don't even know how to revert back to the default driver in case the Edimax driver doesn't work. What is the safest approach to try and get this to work without breaking my system?

Tried


Solution

  • Apparently this is not a bug. It turns out that there is absolutely no bluetooth support in SteamVR for linux. There are a couple of guys who wrote some script to work around it described here: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2805545613

    1. using your android phone: https://github.com/jeroen1602/lighthouse_pm
    2. using python: https://github.com/risa2000/lh2ctrl
    3. using native app and bash shell: https://biechl.net/post/details/5