I just installed a fresh Ubuntu on my old but trusted Toshiba Satellite, offering it a second youth. Everything worked perfectly but Bluetooth was not detected. The Toshiba bluetooth radio is disabled at boot, and it can only be enabled with a particular ACPI call. Sounds like a very proprietary approach... Anyway. To fix this, let's use the omnibook kernel module which is made for many HP Omnibook/Pavillon, Toshiba Satellite (with Phoenix BIOS) and Compal laptops.
First, lets clone the latest version of omnibook from git
git clone git://omnibook.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/omnibook/omnibook cd omnibook/
Now, lets compile and install the omnibook module
make sudo make install
We now need to load the module and see if we can now see the bluetooth adapter
sudo depmod -a sudo modprobe omnibook ectype=14 hcitool dev
It's there! And the bluetooth applet now appears in the task bar.
Now its time to automate this process so the adapter is available when I boot.
sudo su echo "omnibook" >> /etc/modules echo "options omnibook ectype=14 userset=1 bluetooth=1" > /etc/modprobe.d/omnibook.conf exit
I had a strange side effect after a reboot. It seems that the new module somehow messed up some ACPI stuff, resulting in the LCD screen not being back-lit anymore. I had to unplug the laptop, without battery, to get it work again.