So your Bluetooth device is not showing a battery level in Ubuntu and you want to fix it.
I was in the same situation.
I bought a Majority Atlas sound bar from Amazon (as I want to listen to music in the kitchen). It’s a decently-reviewed wireless, Bluetooth speaker with a rechargeable battery and a great range. It works flawlessly in Ubuntu apart from one thing: I can’t check the battery level.
Ubuntu, like most desktop Linux distributions, uses Bluez for its Bluetooth stack.
Bluez is a powerful, open-source tech that supports a wide range of Bluetooth hardware including mice, keyboards, game controllers, headphones, etc.
Usually, if you pair a Bluetooth device with a rechargeable battery in Ubuntu you can check the battery level from Settings > Power panel.
And if your Bluetooth doo-dah can report its battery status with paired to Windows, macOS, Android, or iOS, it can report it in Ubuntu too.
Sadly, life isn’t that simple.
As I found out with my sound bar, a lot of modern Bluetooth headphones, speakers, sound bars, and audio equipment won’t report their battery levels in Ubuntu, despite the fact they can and should — and it’s annoying!
But there is something you can try.
Enabling Bluez experimental features can make battery levels for Bluetooth devices appear in Ubuntu.
Some Linux distributions (including Fedora Workstation) enable these extraneous features by default but as Ubuntu doesn’t you need to turn them on you yourself — but don’t worry as it’s not difficult to do.
To enable Bluez experimental features in Ubuntu:
- Open
/etc/bluetooth/main.confas root - Find the section titled ‘General’ (near the top)
- On a new line add
Experimental = true - Save the file (and hit save again to make sure)
- Reboot or run
systemctl restart bluetooth
Don’t skip the last step – if you do, nothing will change.
Once Bluez experimental features are enabled in Ubuntu and you’ve either restarted your computer or the bluetooth stack, proceed to pair/connect your Bluetooth device, then open Settings > Power (or check the output of bluetoothctl info and look for a ‘battery percentage’ line’):
Hopefully the missing battery level now shows — but if it doesn’t, at least you tried!
While I can’t guarantee this tweak will make device battery levels appear for everything (much less make a device work at all) it’s a moderately easy tweak to try (and importantly easy to undo, just remove the lines you added).
Let me know how you get on!