Arch Linux

lambda_lifter

Member

Registered: 2020-04-19

Posts: 1

Bluetooth Headset Won't Pair After Fresh Reinstall: SOLVED

So I recently did a reinstall of my Arch Linux system to set up a drive with BTRFS (I know i could convert but also just wanted a clean drive), everything went fine except for some reason I can no longer pair my bluetooth headphones. My bluetooth mouse pairs/connects just fine so it's not bluetooth in general. Also my headphones can pair with my phone and actually even my other Arch OS on my laptop just fine so it's not the headphones.

When I attempt to pair with bluetoothctl all i get is

Attempting to pair with 1C:36:BB:...
Failed to pair: org.bluez.Error.AuthenticationCanceled

The only error shown by systemctl status bluetooth i get on both machines is

.... bluetoothd[617]: Pair device timed out for hci0

I've tried:

1. disabling / enabling SSPmode (as is the only suggestion for dealing with not pairing on https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Bluetooth_headset)

2. I'm running gnome, and I've made sure gdm is not running a second pulseaudio instance (and confirmed this with pgrep)

3. resetting pulseaudio with pulseaudio -k

4. of course i've installed bluez, bluez-utils, bluez-firmware and enabled bluetooth with systemctl

5. Also finally I've of course tried resetting the headphones

I've had trouble pairing bluetooth headphones on every Arch system i've ever used but most of the time it was fixed by steps 1,2 or 3, this time i'm really stuck! Is it possible something weird is happening here because the headphones were previously paired with another Arch OS on the same system (i.e bluetooth device with the same mac id??). I should mention I'm dual booting with windows, and previously followed the steps here https://unix.stackexchange.com/question … aving-to-p to allow me to use bluetooth on both OS's (although I'm unable to follow the steps on my current install now because I can't even pair).

UPDATE: SOLVED
The issue was it was trying to use bluetooth LE for pairing, I had to set

ControllerMode = bedr

in

/etc/bluetooth/main.conf

(as stated in to do in the wiki https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Bluetooth_headset. One issue here, the wiki had this under a section "PC shows device as paired, but is not recognized by device" when my system just was not pairing (hence I initially ignored it) perhaps this should be updated?

Last edited by lambda_lifter (2020-04-19 20:03:48)