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Accepted
dotancohen
Asked: 2015-01-02 04:09:53 +0800 CST

Intermittently cannot connect to Beats Bluetooth headset from CLI

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I have a Beats Studio Wireless bluetooth headset that intermittently cannot connect to Kubuntu 14.10. This is what is happening:

$ lsusb | grep -i blue
Bus 002 Device 005: ID 0a12:0001 Cambridge Silicon Radio, Ltd Bluetooth Dongle (HCI mode)

$ hciconfig
hci0:   Type: BR/EDR  Bus: USB
        BD Address: 00:15:83:07:C6:5A  ACL MTU: 384:8  SCO MTU: 64:8
        UP RUNNING PSCAN ISCAN 
        RX bytes:2052 acl:0 sco:0 events:131 errors:0
        TX bytes:810 acl:0 sco:0 commands:73 errors:0

$ hcitool scan
Scanning ...
        00:11:22:00:11:59       Beats Wireless

$ bluez-simple-agent hci# 00:11:22:00:11:59
Creating device failed: org.bluez.Error.AlreadyExists: Already Exists

$ bluez-test-input connect 00:11:22:00:11:59
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/bluez-test-input", line 40, in <module>
    input.Connect()
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/dbus/proxies.py", line 70, in __call__
    return self._proxy_method(*args, **keywords)
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/dbus/proxies.py", line 145, in __call__
    **keywords)
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/dbus/connection.py", line 651, in call_blocking
    message, timeout)
dbus.exceptions.DBusException: org.bluez.Error.NotSupported: Operation is not supported

$ bt-audio -c  00:11:22:00:11:59
Error: Did not receive a reply. Possible causes include: the remote application did not send a reply, the message bus security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or the network connection was broken.

If I continually click the Blueman system tray icon's "Recent Connections -> Audio Sink on Beats Wireless" option, then eventually the headset will connect.

wireless

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    It seems that there are bluetooth dongles which forge the Broadcom identifier even though they don't 100% follow the Bluetooth spec. Apparently my device, which cost $2 on ebay including shipping, is one of those.

    According to the bug linked, the Ubuntu devs know about this and are even including workarounds for these devices. However, the real solution is to buy a higher-quality bluetooth dongle which follows the spec and does not forge its identity.

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