Edward wrote:
All of the Bluetooth headphones I have, include
microphones. Only two
models (Inland 87099 and Creative) have the electronics to support the
HSP/HFP profile.
My intent was to use the headphone mic in one of these for online
meetings (Zoom, Jitsi, etc.), but under Debian, this isn't working with
the installed software. pulseaudio-module-bluetooth is installed, as is
ofono, blueman, bluez-tools, bluez, bluez-obexd and libbluetooth3.
This exact same setup worked when I had TDE/PCLinuxOS installed with the
same packages as above (the libbluetooth package might have been named
differently).
Under PCLOS, I used the PC's on-board audio at the time. I do not know
if the new PCI-E sound card I have now, has anything to do with this
issue, even though the card's /Front Microphone (unplugged)/ entry shows
activity in the PA volume control, until I mute it.
With either the Inland or Creative headphones connected on the HSP/HFP
profile: no mic, no audio in the headphones, no audio from the PC
speakers. Changing profile to A2DP resumes the audio from the
headphones, the headphone mics never worked under A2DP.
pacmd list-sink-inputs lists one input, the headphones.
list-source-outputs indicated 0 (zero) source outputs available.
Yes, I'm also
pissed with that - it (I mean pulseaudio, systemd, udev,
bluetoothd and whatever else) does what it wants - it seems totally out of
control, although the "experts" have very good intentions.
What I am wondering is if the BT, PA, Systemd and udev versions on PCLOS and
on the Debian are the same ... hmm you can add Ofono to this gang.
When I was testing the phone - it was also working sometime and sometime
not, but the phone is another offspring of this gang as itself is running
Sailfish OS with the gang running on it.
This bluez5 is another KDE4 like story - they enforced it to us while it was
not working at all. Now things are getting slowly better, but still it is
not OK - why, because the software tries to take a decision on the desired
configuration - decision that is hidden from you.
What I've been doing is reading documentation and trying to change
configuration - finally I gave it up - I do not have the time and I use BT
only to sync my PIM data from the phone to the PC.
But I'm pissed that the phone stopped working with the car, while with
bluez4 it still works perfectly well.
Anyway - for you the only way is to try manually hack this (probably in
bluetoothctl and pacmd) but chances are good to find answer somewhere on
the net, because you are not alone with that.
Bus 003 Device 002: ID 0a5c:21e8 Broadcom Corp. BCM20702A0 Bluetooth 4.0
This is the USB dongle that I have, bought this particular one from
Amazon as the description said it works with Linux and technically, it
does.
After installing the TDE packages over Debian, I lost the Plymouth
bootsplash and get rows of messages before the login screen appears. One
of the lines mentions that it can't find the firmware for this device.
I'm guessing at this point, that there is something included with PCLOS
that makes this device work properly, which Debian apparently doesn't
include, however there is a package 'bluez-firmware', its description
indicates it's required for operation of Bluetooth dongles based on the
Broadcom BCM203x chipset. But there is a GitHub project page with DEB
and RPM firmware packages for the 20702, so I'll give it a try.
--
Linux. A Continual Learning Experience.