bluetooth speakers - RESOLVED

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mimosa
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bluetooth speakers - RESOLVED

Post by mimosa »

Slackware switched from ALSA to pulseaudio, among other reasons, for its bluetooth support. So I naively bought myself this for bathroom listening:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B071DKC1LM/

Having spent some time rooting around, it seems one reason it might not work is because my computer has no bluetooth. Indeed, I can see no mention of it in the specs. dmesg tells me:

Code: Select all

mimosa[~]$ sudo dmesg |grep tooth
[  199.559962] Bluetooth: Core ver 2.21
[  199.559976] Bluetooth: HCI device and connection manager initialized
[  199.559980] Bluetooth: HCI socket layer initialized
[  199.559982] Bluetooth: L2CAP socket layer initialized
[  199.559986] Bluetooth: SCO socket layer initialized
mimosa[~]$ hcitool scan
Device is not available: No such device
I'm not too sure how to interpret this, but I suspect I need to buy a usb dongle to use my speakers - but I am already feeling rather out of my depth. Has anyone had any success with this?

I should mention that I started the bluetooth service (perhaps this is the default but I generally do turn it off).

EDIT
Having dug around a bit more I think I will order a dongle with this chipset, which is said to work among others with the Raspberry Pi, so I imagine Linux kernel support is good:
https://www.qualcomm.com/products/csr8510
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ChuangTzu
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Re: bluetooth speakers

Post by ChuangTzu »

If you don't have built in bluetooth, then you'll need the dongle. They are quite inexpensive and Amazon has many different brands.

That speaker looks interesting, I might have to ask my wife to get me one for Xmas. :)

Let us know how you get on with it.
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mimosa
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Re: bluetooth speakers

Post by mimosa »

ChuangTzu wrote:If you don't have built in bluetooth,
Does it look to you as though I really don't, then? Is there anything else I should be checking? These are uncertain waters for me (my first foray into bluetooth).
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gapan
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Re: bluetooth speakers

Post by gapan »

Run:

Code: Select all

sudo lsusb -v | grep -i bluetooth
If you get nothing, you don't have bluetooth.
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mimosa
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Re: bluetooth speakers

Post by mimosa »

Thanks! I get this:

Code: Select all

mimosa[~]$ sudo lsusb -v | grep -i bluetooth
Password: 
can't get debug descriptor: Resource temporarily unavailable
can't get device qualifier: Resource temporarily unavailable
can't get debug descriptor: Resource temporarily unavailable
can't get debug descriptor: Resource temporarily unavailable
can't get debug descriptor: Resource temporarily unavailable
can't get debug descriptor: Resource temporarily unavailable
can't get debug descriptor: Resource temporarily unavailable
can't get debug descriptor: Resource temporarily unavailable
can't get device qualifier: Resource temporarily unavailable
can't get debug descriptor: Resource temporarily unavailable
which I take to be effectively nothing. But I did see one last thing to try while searching further: "make sure bluetooth is not disabled in your BIOS". I doubt it is, but I mention it for anyone reading this thread in the future. My dongle is already on its way.
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gapan
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Re: bluetooth speakers

Post by gapan »

Yes, that's nothing. But you should also make sure that it is not disabled in the BIOS and also that it is not disabled by a hotkey. With some laptops there are dedicated switches for wifi and bluetooth, but usually there is a key combination like Fn+F10/F11 to enable/disable wifi/bluetooth. You should also check that.
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mimosa
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Re: bluetooth speakers

Post by mimosa »

I now have the dongle and I am all at sea again. I just tried the methods here using hciconfig and bluetoothctl:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/128 ... ithout-pin

In both cases the bluetooth speakers were detected, and "paired" successfully, but failed with no informative message at the "connect" stage. I'm reluctant to start messing around with config files before having some idea what I'm doing.

I also tried this:
mimosa[~]$ sudo rfcomm connect /dev/rfcomm0 XXXXXXXXXX
Password:
Can't connect RFCOMM socket: Connection refused

Many of the pages I looked at (including the bluetooth page on slackwiki) mention a PIN, but I think this may have more to do with connecting to a phone (which is the situation generally assumed). The instructions in the box don't say anything about a PIN. Linux is also not mentioned, of course.
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gapan
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Re: bluetooth speakers

Post by gapan »

I don't know about the commands you tried, but I happen to have a bluetooth speaker, which I had never actually used with bluetooth until now. It can also receive sound from an audio cable jack and can read files from USB drives and microSD cards.

I've always had blueman installed, and I just used the applet to pair it with my PC, turn it to an "audio destination" (the term might not be exact in english) and it was immediately available as an audio output in pulseaudio. The whole process probably took me about 40 seconds.
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mimosa
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Re: bluetooth speakers

Post by mimosa »

That sounds more like it. I'm using ratpoison with no tray, how can I see the applet?

If that's not straightforward, I can revert temporarily to xfce and hope the setting sticks.
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gapan
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Re: bluetooth speakers

Post by gapan »

You need a tray for it. peksystray or wmsystemtray should work.
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