disabling the Bluetooth driver

 

Increase battery life by disabling the Bluetooth driver

13. If you rarely use Bluetooth, you can probably increase the battery life of your laptop a lot by disabling the Bluetooth driver (instead of simply disabling the Bluetooth feature). Like this:

a. Launch a terminal window.
(You can launch a terminal window like this: *Click*)

b. Copy/paste this blue line into the terminal (it's one line!):

echo "blacklist btusb" | sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-bluetooth.conf

Press Enter. Type your password when prompted. In Ubuntu this remains entirely invisible, not even dots will show when you type it, that's normal. In Mint this has changed: you'll see asterisks when you type. Press Enter again.

c. Reboot your computer.

How to undo (re-enabling Bluetooth support)

13.1. Do you want to enable Bluetooth again? Then proceed as follows:

a. Temporary re-enabling Bluetooth can be done with this terminal command:

sudo modprobe -v btusb

This will instantly re-enable Bluetooth, but it won't survive a reboot.

b. Permanent re-enabling of Bluetooth can be achieved by the following terminal command which removes the Bluetooth module from the blacklist:

sudo rm -v /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-bluetooth.conf

Then reboot your computer. Bluetooth should be available again permanently.