I made a couple of purchases yesterday, including a Bluetooth speaker and a USB Bluetooth dongle to pair it to my computer. Now here’s a couple things that you need to know about said computer:

  • It runs Linux
  • It runs a customized build of the Zen kernel with a very slimmed down config
  • It has never had Bluetooth connectivity before

Thanks to this combination of factors, things got weird. I tried a bunch of things before getting it working, so it is entirely possible that I miss some steps that were important but I didn’t think so while writing this. Let me know in the comments if I missed something.

Getting the right packages

You’re gonna need 1) a GUI to handle BT devices, b) the PulseAudio module for Bluetooth. For the GUI I used blueberry, and pulseaudio-module-bluetooth for PulseAudio support.

I did apt install -y blueberry pulseaudio-module-bluetooth to get these on Linux Mint, you should use whatever your distro’s preferred package management interface is.

Fixing up the kernel (optional)

I mentioned earlier that I run a very slimmed down config, which means nothing that I didn’t already use was enabled. This included Bluetooth, so I went ahead and enabled all the configs for it here, then installed the new kernel and rebooted into it. You shouldn’t need to do this if you do not run a custom kernel. To be completely sure, check your dmesg for Bluetooth initialization logs:

$ dmesg | rg Bluetooth
[    0.146115] Bluetooth: Core ver 2.22
[    0.146118] Bluetooth: HCI device and connection manager initialized
[    0.146119] Bluetooth: HCI socket layer initialized
[    0.146119] Bluetooth: L2CAP socket layer initialized
[    0.146120] Bluetooth: SCO socket layer initialized
[    0.325395] Bluetooth: HCI UART driver ver 2.3
[    0.327116] Bluetooth: RFCOMM socket layer initialized
[    0.327117] Bluetooth: RFCOMM ver 1.11
[    0.327117] Bluetooth: BNEP (Ethernet Emulation) ver 1.3
[    0.327119] Bluetooth: BNEP socket layer initialized
[    0.327119] Bluetooth: HIDP (Human Interface Emulation) ver 1.2
[    0.327120] Bluetooth: HIDP socket layer initialized

Wrapping up

If you’re not a relatively up-to-date distro, you might need to make some more manual adjustments before everything works. Open up /etc/pulse/default.pa in any editor with root access (so you can write your changes back), then look for module-bluetooth-discover. In my version of the file, I have this:

.ifexists module-bluetooth-discover.so
load-module module-bluetooth-discover
.endif

It means that if the module is discovered, it will be loaded. On older versions this might just be # load-module module-bluetooth-discover. In that case, uncomment the line.

Next, open up /usr/bin/start-pulseaudio-x11 in the same way. Look for this:

if [ x"$SESSION_MANAGER" != x ] ; then
    /usr/bin/pactl load-module module-x11-xsmp "display=$DISPLAY xauthority=$XAUTHORITY session_manager=$SESSION_MANAGER" > /dev/null
fi

Below it, add /usr/bin/pactl load-module module-bluetooth-discover so the final result looks like this:

if [ x"$SESSION_MANAGER" != x ] ; then
    /usr/bin/pactl load-module module-x11-xsmp "display=$DISPLAY xauthority=$XAUTHORITY session_manager=$SESSION_MANAGER" > /dev/null
fi
/usr/bin/pactl load-module module-bluetooth-discover

This will manually load the module when X11 triggers PulseAudio init. This should ideally not be required so you can try without this change, but it won’t break anything if you add it anyway.

Once done, reboot your computer and you should be able to pair and connect to devices and play audio through them.