Pair a bluetooth headset with 42.2 (ideally, with icewm)

English Hardware
1

Hello,

I have a bluetooth headset (Bose Quietcomfort 35) and I am trying to connect it to Leap 42.2 properly. My goal is actually to achieve this using Icewm (I have an old netbook which does not run well with KDE or Plasma).
I have two devices on which I am testing the connection: my main laptop and the aforementioned netbook. The laptop has win10 and leap42.2 on it and can run any GUI and the netbook has leap 42.2 and works fine only with icewm.

The headset works perfectly fine with win10 on my laptop in both headphone (A2DP) and headset (HFP) modes (i.e., I can listen to music and make skype calls with this with no issues and the protocol is switched automatically). So, at least in this case, I know that the hardware is perfectly capable to connect right if the software is properly set.
If I try to connect the headset under KDE Plasma workspace on the same laptop, it gets connected via HFP (characteristic noise and mode switch signal in the headset) but not via A2DP. The headset is present under audio but no sounds can be played with it (if, say, I play a youtube video, the sound comes via the speakers on the laptop and not the headset even if the volume of the headset is set to 100%). I tried the tricks from other forums such as this:
http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/292189/pairing-bose-qc-35-over-bluetooth-on-fedora
but this does not fix anything. In fact, it seems that the bluetooth settings are not in /etc/bluetooth/ on OpenSuse since writing an obviously incorrect main.conf (just tried it with the word “garbage” inside) does not result in any error upon restart of bluetooth. Since all forums for other distros suggest manipulations of .conf files in this folder, this direction seems pretty unproductive to me.

If I use Icewm on the laptop, I can also connect to the headset via blueberry with the same effect (HFP instead of A2DP) and the connection seems far less reproducible - sometimes it works and sometimes it does not connect at all.
On the netbook under Icewm I get “connection failed” every time I try to connect.

So, here are my questions:

  1. Does anybody have an idea how to force the bluetooth to use A2DP and not HFP on opensuse or at least where can I find the .conf files for this if they exist?
  2. Which bluetooth manager works best with Icewm and where can I get it?
  3. How can I troubleshoot connection failed errors on the netbook?

Cheers,
Konstl

2

For a minimal desktop environment (like icewm) you can try “blueman” (Version > 2.0, needs GTK but no gnome libs), for the CLI you can use “bluetoothctl” (which is inside “bluez” package).

AK

3

Is there a way to force bluetoothctl to use A2DP?

4

Am Mon, 16 Jan 2017 21:56:01 GMT
schrieb konstl000 <konstl000@no-mx.forums.microfocus.com>:

> Is there a way to force bluetoothctl to use A2DP?

No, as that is not bluetoothctl’s job, it takes care of the pairing part.

But maybe this might be helpful:

https://thecodeninja.net/2016/06/bluetooth-audio-receiver-a2dp-sink-with-raspberry-pi/

Or one of the other results I found with a quick search

https://duckduckgo.com/lite/?q=bluetoothctl+a2dp

AK

–
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
(R.J. Hanlon)