[SOLVED] Unable to connect to Bose speaker via Bluetooth

[extraspecialbitter]

I recently purchased a Plugable Bluetooth USB adapter for the purpose of connecting to a Bose Soundlink Color II speaker. After working through several issues, the bluetooth adapter appears to function and pair with the device, but fails to connect - both via blueman-applet and bluetoothctl.

Some diagnostic data:

Code: Select all

pablo@eltriunfo=> systemctl status bluetooth
● bluetooth.service - Bluetooth service
   Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/bluetooth.service; enabled)
   Active: active (running) since Sun 2017-12-24 17:33:22 EST; 1 day 23h ago
     Docs: man:bluetoothd(8)
 Main PID: 1971 (bluetoothd)
   Status: "Running"
   CGroup: /system.slice/bluetooth.service
           └─1971 /usr/lib/bluetooth/bluetoothd
pablo@eltriunfo=> rfkill list all
0: phy0: Wireless LAN
	Soft blocked: no
	Hard blocked: no
1: dell-wifi: Wireless LAN
	Soft blocked: no
	Hard blocked: no
4: hci0: Bluetooth
	Soft blocked: no
	Hard blocked: no
pablo@eltriunfo=> bluetoothctl
[NEW] Controller 5C:F3:70:87:EE:C4 eltriunfo [default]
[NEW] Device 2C:41:A1:65:81:CC Bose Color II SoundLink
[bluetooth]# agent on
Agent registered
[bluetooth]# power on
Changing power on succeeded
[bluetooth]# paired-devices
Device 2C:41:A1:65:81:CC Bose Color II SoundLink
[bluetooth]# connect 2C:41:A1:65:81:CC
Attempting to connect to 2C:41:A1:65:81:CC
Failed to connect: org.bluez.Error.Failed

In blueman-applet, the device appears to connect, but fails right away. At no time am I able to hear sound.

I've also noticed that when I bring up pavucontrol, I don't see the Bose speaker listed as an option, which to me seems to confirm that the devices are pairing but not connecting.

I am running Debian 8.2 with the 3.16.0-4-amd64 kernel.

Thanks in advance.

[Dai_trying]

I recently had a couple of issues setting up a bluetooth device and had to install the pulseaudio-module-bluetooth in order to get it to work (this was not a pure Debian install but on a derivative so YMMV)

[extraspecialbitter]

Thanks for the reply. I believe I did install pulseaudio-module-bluetooth at some point in my troubleshooting, but I might not have stopped and restarted pulseaudio after doing so. I'll try this out when I get home from work today.

BTW I'm also using a Debian variant, in my case Bunsen Labs "Hydrogen", which uses Debian repos in a minimal setup.

[extraspecialbitter]

As suspected, pulseaudio-module-bluetooth was already installed, but apparently I hadn't stopped and restarted pulseaudio after the install.

Code: Select all

pulseaudio -k
pulseaudio --start

After pairing and connecting to the Bose speaker, it showed up in pavucontrol. From there, I was able to select it for playback, after which I brought up banshee and began to play music over the speaker. Life is good.