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rolfie

Member

Registered: 2017-11-25

Posts: 1,240  

Bluetooth support on laptop

So far I haven't installed anything to support bluetooth on my travelling laptop. Wifi is working, that was enough.

As preparation for an aniversary party I want to enable bluetooth to be able to connect to a Sonos system to play some music. The laptop is running Daedalus with pipewire, that works fine on the internal speakers and headset if that is connected.

When I now look at what is happening when I try to install blueman, pipewire-alsa is removed and pulseaudio is installed instead. I don't want that.

Do I have alternatives?

My assumption is that the Atheros chipset is supporting as well wifi as bluetooth. Correct? Wifi is installed, drivers and firmware are present. Are any additions required for bluetooth?

lspci
...
04:00.0 Network controller: Qualcomm Atheros QCA6174 802.11ac Wireless Network Adapter (rev 32)7

Thanks, rolfie

delgado

Member

Registered: 2022-07-14

Posts: 228  

Re: Bluetooth support on laptop

Maybe

apt-get install blueman pipewire-pulse

Yes, this is also something pulseaudio ... .

Wifi and bluetooth are sharing the 2.4 GHz band. Using one chip for both is an option.

ralph.ronnquist

Administrator

From: Battery Point, Tasmania, AUS

Registered: 2016-11-30

Posts: 1,340  

Re: Bluetooth support on laptop

There's bluealsa (package bluez-alsa-utils) for using bluetooth without pulseaudio.

Though it'll also need asoundrc configuration both so as to make the choice of output dynamic (so you can select output for an already started program) and to have bluealsa as one of the sinks. I'm happy to drop my setup here if you are interested.

EDIT: actually you might get that dynamic choice via pipewire, so the only ALSA pcm setup you need would be for the "output" itself. Something like the following (which I named bt_qudo (for my Qudo speaker):

pcm.bt_qudo {
    type softvol
    slave {
        pcm {
            type bluealsa
            device 30:21:DC:50:9E:89
            profile a2dp
        }
    }
    control { name "PCM" ; card 0; }
    max_dB 15.0
}

You will need to set your mac address; i.e. the "device" value, and then of course adjust "max" to your liking.

With that you would need to confiure pipewire playback to use "bt_qudo".

(Then I also have a vague memory of some dbus configuration fiddling; I will need to browse my setup a bit to remind me about that)

dzz

Member

From: Exmouth, South West England

Registered: 2016-12-01

Posts: 57  

Re: Bluetooth support on laptop

Blueman installs here without pulseaudio. Makes life a lot simpler to connect bluetooth devices.  Do you have dbus-x11? There is a nasty alt dependency, default-dbus-session-bus .. failing that you could apt-pin pulseaudio to -1 and see what happens.

:~$ dpkg -l|egrep "pulse|blueman"
ii  apulse:amd64                           0.1.13-2                                amd64        PulseAudio emulation for ALSA
ii  blueman                                2.3.5-2+b1                              amd64        Graphical bluetooth manager
ii  libpulse-mainloop-glib0:amd64          16.1+dfsg1-2+b1                         amd64        PulseAudio client libraries (glib support)
ii  libpulse0:amd64                        16.1+dfsg1-2+b1                         amd64        PulseAudio client libraries
ii  pipewire-pulse                         0.3.65-3+deb12u1                        amd64        PipeWire PulseAudio daemon

Another laptop here, working bluetooth sound, uses bluez-alsa. It comes with no sysvinit script but one is here: https://github.com/joe-skb7/bluealsa-sysvinit ..

Last edited by dzz (2025-03-05 22:30:30)