How to enable Bluetooth on Raspberry Pi 4 running Ubuntu server 18.04

If you have installed Ubuntu Server 18.04 on your Raspberry Pi 4, you might notice that the Bluetooth hardware is disabled by default.

To enable Bluetooth, you need to read the instructions written in the /boot/firmware/nobtcfg.txt file.

The solution is to edit syscfg.txt and change include nobtcfg.txt to include btcfg.txt and reboot.

[email protected]:/boot/firmware$ cat nobtcfg.txt 

# This configuration file sets the system up to support the serial console on
# GPIOs 14 & 15. This is the default for Ubuntu on the Pi, but disables the use
# of the Bluetooth module.
#
# If you wish to disable the serial console and use Bluetooth instead, install
# the "pi-bluetooth" package then edit "syscfg.txt" to include "btcfg.txt"
# instead of "nobtcfg.txt"

enable_uart=1
cmdline=nobtcmd.txt
#dtoverlay=pi3-disable-bt
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Next, you need to install the pi-bluetooth package which is available for newer Ubuntu releases like 19.10, but you can download the .deb file and manually install it:

wget http://turul.canonical.com/ubuntu-ports/pool/multiverse/p/pi-bluetooth/pi-bluetooth_0.1.10ubuntu6_arm64.deb
sudo dpkg -i pi-bluetooth_0.1.10ubuntu6_arm64.deb

# Reboot and you should be able to use bluetoothctl
sudo bluetoothctl
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