Meritoryous

Troubleshooting my Bluetooth Headset, Makin' it Work with Arch Linux

Since the the Bluez wiki has disappeared, it's been hard for me to get my new bluetooth SBH500 stereo headset to work. I know there are packages out there for KDE, gnome, etc. that with GUI's that will connect my headset and take care of the pairing for me, but I'm old school. I like to use command line interfaces.

According to the Arch wiki on Bluetooth, I should be able to pair my headset using hcitool and bluez-simple-agent.

After installing bluez and placing my headset in pairing mode, I do a quick scan for my headset.

I grab the MAC address for my device and go on to pair with bluez-simple-agent. Start it up with using the previously grabbed MAC.

I was prompted for the headset's PIN, which I obidently entred and I was connected. Now, to get the music cranking. First, I'd like to get it to work with ALSA (again, I'm old school). Per the plentitud of examples out there, I added/changed /etc/asound.conf to add a device for the bluetooth headset.

 #/etc/asound.conf

 pcm.btheadset {
    type plug
    slave {
        pcm {
            type bluetooth
            device 00:21:19:24:68:7E 
            profile "auto"
        }   
    }   

    hint {
        show on
        description "BT Headset"
    }   
 }

 ctl.btheadset {
   type bluetooth
 }  

Next, I check to see if ALSA is on board. aplay can list the PCMs it knows about using a flag.

Bingo, btheadset is in the list. Now for the real test.