Technology / 

23 Jun 2022

"Sap driver initialization failed" message on Lenovo T430s with Debian Bullseye

After installing Debian Bullseye on T430s, there seemed to be an issue with Bluetooth on this machine. It may be caused (?) by not having a SIM card in the cellular modem (??), although that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

The problem and associated error message can be triggered by running:

sudo service bluetooth status

which returns this error message in the logs:

profiles/sap/server.c:sap_server_register() Sap driver initialization failed.

Although this is for the RasPi, it might be a solution or somewhat related: https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/40839/sap-error-on-bluetooth-service-status

Based on that, I used the systemd (I think?) command to create a config override file and modify it…

$ sudo systemctl edit bluetooth.service

This created the file /etc/systemd/system/bluetooth.service.d/01-disable-sap-plugin.conf, in which I put in a new start command that disables the ‘sap’ plugin.

Then:

$ sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo service bluetooth restart
sudo service bluetooth status

And it seemed to start without errors. Weird.