How can I tell if my laptop has Bluetooth?

Your kernel would have picked it up and loaded a module for it when you started Ubuntu. From the command line, gnome-terminal type this command:

dmesg | grep -i blue

If you get output simliar to the below then your laptop has bluetooth capability.

[    2.933062] usb 1-1.4: Product: Broadcom Bluetooth Device

Using lsusb:

sudo lsusb |grep Bluetooth

Should give an output similar to:

Device 005: ID 0a12:0001 Cambridge Silicon Radio, Ltd Bluetooth Dongle (HCI mode)

If there is no bluetooth device, you'll get no output for this command.

Courtesy: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BluetoothSetup#Manual_Discovery

on my Asus laptop i have a Bluetooth icon on the top right and

dmesg | grep Blue

Gets:

[    3.757769] Bluetooth: Core ver 2.16
[    3.757798] Bluetooth: HCI device and connection manager initialized
[    3.757802] Bluetooth: HCI socket layer initialized
[    3.757805] Bluetooth: L2CAP socket layer initialized
[    3.757814] Bluetooth: SCO socket layer initialized
[    3.767297] Bluetooth: Generic Bluetooth USB driver ver 0.6
[    4.332846] Bluetooth: RFCOMM TTY layer initialized
[    4.332853] Bluetooth: RFCOMM socket layer initialized
[    4.332856] Bluetooth: RFCOMM ver 1.11
[    4.340772] Bluetooth: BNEP (Ethernet Emulation) ver 1.3
[    4.340776] Bluetooth: BNEP filters: protocol multicast

but: sudo lsusb |grep Bluetooth Doesn't return anything.

also check if you have a Hardware network (airplane mode) switch. This can disable bluetooth and make it not visible to Ubuntu