Microsoft Surface Ergonomic Bluetooth Keyboard paired but not working

[Maximus5684]

I had the same issue using Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and I thought it would be worth posting my solution. This was an issue with the version of bluez that is included (assuming it's the same for this distro). BLE doesn't work correctly before bluez 5.42. I had to manually backport 5.43 (the 17.10 version) to get mine to work. Here are instructions for Ubuntu:

https://askubuntu.com/questions/883713/u...untu-16-04

I then had to reboot and un-pair and re-pair the keyboard using bluetoothctl and typing in the passkey on the MS keyboard itself to get it to work.

Hope this helps someone!