I have a Sony bluetooth speaker I usually use with iPhone and Macbooks. I’ve wanted to use it with my Ubuntu Xenial (4.4.0-93-generic) desktop for a long time but never got around to getting a bluetooth dongle or an RCA cable.
Today I went to Fry’s to get some cables for another project and finally decided to grab a USB Bluetooth dongle. I picked up a Sabrent BT-UB40 as it claims to have Linux support.
The device was immediately recognized and supported in the Unity UI after plugging it in. It also supported pairing to my Sony speaker. However, when trying to “connect” the following messages were dumped to syslog:
Nov 5 14:02:49 machina bluetoothd[26700]: Failed to obtain handles for "Service Changed" characteristic
Nov 5 14:02:49 machina bluetoothd[26700]: Not enough free handles to register service
Nov 5 14:02:49 machina bluetoothd[26700]: Error adding Link Loss service
Nov 5 14:02:49 machina bluetoothd[26700]: Not enough free handles to register service
Nov 5 14:02:49 machina bluetoothd[26700]: message repeated 2 times: [ Not enough free handles to register service]
Nov 5 14:02:49 machina bluetoothd[26700]: Current Time Service could not be registered
Nov 5 14:02:49 machina bluetoothd[26700]: gatt-time-server: Input/output error (5)
Nov 5 14:02:49 machina bluetoothd[26700]: Not enough free handles to register service
Nov 5 14:02:49 machina bluetoothd[26700]: Not enough free handles to register service
Nov 5 14:02:49 machina bluetoothd[26700]: Sap driver initialization failed.
After a bunch of googling and looking at logs, installing the following package and then disconnecting and re-pairing the device makes it usable:
apt-get install pulseaudio-module-bluetooth
Proof:
Linux on the desktop has progressed significantly over the past 10 years in terms of UI to manage hardware, yet some polish is still needed to make things completely JFW out of the box.