My Solution: Hardy 8.04 and Bluetooth headsets

[ian.d.rossi]

Thank you so much for this. I love Hardy and it's the best distro ever. The only thing (critical thing) I couldn't do was use Skype. I use it for all of my business calling. Being able to use my BT headset solved the problem. I also would like to see this process made easier by the Ubuntu team.

Thanks again.

-Ian

[secr3tuprising]

I just spent a few minutes tweaking the FossWire script for connecting bluetooth headphones and it should help people out who are having some issues.
It is specifically for Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04 LTS 64bit.

After extracting run

sh bluetooth_skype_ubuntu64bit.sh

and all the 32bit libraries for skype will be downloaded and installed and will also pair your headset automatically with a python script.

This also fixes the libasound_module_pcm_bluetooth.so issue by copying that file to the correct directory

[bin-da]

I've followed your instructions (removed bluetooth-alsa, etc.) but I cannot use Skype and so on. headset is paired with my computer. it seems that connection is OK - when I try to make a call, it beeps and i hear noise but it doesn't work - Skype tells me that there are problems with my audio.
I also tried aplay / arecord - always get the same error:

ALSA lib pcm_bluetooth.c:460:(bluetooth_hsp_hw_params) BT_SETCONFIGURATION failed : Input/output error(5)

any ideas?

[BigPingu]

Thanks a lot for your script secr3tuprising.
It works great

Bye
BigPingu

[Zer0Nin3r]

2) uninstall or do not install bluetooth-alsa or bluez-btsco

Why don't you want bluetooh-alsa or bluez-btsco installed? Do those two packages not function properly, or do they need more development?

[raymondvillain]

I would like to try the solution posted by psyke777 4 weeks ago.

If I open a terminal and type hciconfig -a hci0 the machine tells me

"Can't get device info: no such device"

I have bluetooth, bluez-audio, bluez-gnome and bluez-utils installed. Neither bluetooth-alsa nor bluez-btsco are installed.

I did install blueman but it doen't do a thing.

Any suggestions?

[sravi_in]

I followed the instructions above to setup skype and music player correctly. But the issue is now only one application is able to use bluetooth device exclusively.

So if I am listening to music in amarok, i won't be able to open kaffine or i will miss incoming skype call. Kaffine says the device is busy and cannot use it. Skype says failure to caputre audio.

Is there any solution for this?

[secr3tuprising]

Why don't you want bluetooh-alsa or bluez-btsco installed? Do those two packages not function properly, or do they need more development?

bluetooth-alsa comes with Hardy 8.04 by default, as well as all the other bluez-utils and whatnot

I followed the instructions above to setup skype and music player correctly. But the issue is now only one application is able to use bluetooth device exclusively.

So if I am listening to music in amarok, i won't be able to open kaffine or i will miss incoming skype call. Kaffine says the device is busy and cannot use it. Skype says failure to caputre audio.

Is there any solution for this?

As far as I know, you can only have one configured at a time.. I know it sucks, but we're definitely making progress.. I got around this by having 2 different bluetooth devices which i connect and configure separately.

[g3k]

I have followed the directions several times, have gotten the headset to pair and even beep when I begin to do a test record so I know there is a connection.

However it does not record anything and when I try to play something back through the headset the capslock and scroll lock lights on my keyboard begin to blink and I am unable to input anything from mouse or keyboard and must force the laptop to power down.

This happens both within Skype and other programs.

I am using a Targus USB dongle (MBT-1203) and a LG HBM-750 Headset.

Are either of these not compatible with sound on Ubuntu or am I not doing something correctly?

[TechnoChick]

I spent way too much time getting my bluetooth headphones to work on Ubuntu 7.10. Thanks to this thread I was finally successful. I used blueman 0.3 and a variant of the .asoundrc file.

For other reasons I upgraded to Ubuntu 8.04. The upgrade went smoothly, and I could still get my headphones to "connect", but Rhythmbox always sent its audio to my speakers, not my headphones.

I upgraded to blueman 0.5 (see http://blueman.tuxfamily.org and select "downloads" for apt-get instructions). Unfortunately that didn't fix my problem.

Then I found http://wiki.bluez.org/wiki/HOWTO/AudioDevices. This site describes how to direct the audio output of each of the popular players.

For example, to send the Rhythmbox output to the bluetooth headphones:

gconftool -t string -s /system/gstreamer/0.10/default/musicaudiosink "alsasink device=bluetooth"

To send it to the speakers:

gconftool -t string -s /system/gstreamer/0.10/default/musicaudiosink "autoaudiosink"

These commands are pretty cryptic so I made a couple of scripts.

Under 7.10 I didn't have to do this. By using this .asoundrc:

pcm.!default {
type bluetooth
}

my system would autodetect whether or not my headphones were connected and choose between the speakers and headphones accordingly. Now I have to explicitly execute the desired script before cranking up Rhythmbox.

I'm now using this .asoundrc:

pcm.bluetooth {
type bluetooth
device XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX
}

I'm too tired to determine which .asoundrc is best. But I'm happy to report my headphones are working!

Hope this will prove helpful.