Bluetooth problem

I am new to zorin. Just installed and trying to get the bluetooth service to work. I am running zorin os 12.4 54 bit. I've checked for updates and the response is the sytem has not updates available. I see the following problem and can't find anything on the zoin support forum or via google that seems to help/apply. The symptom is that the bluetooth manager just spins searching for devices. I've tried a variety of things but they are just guessing as I have never seen this issue before.

xxxxx@Zorin:~$ systemctl status bluetooth
● bluetooth.service - Bluetooth service
Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/bluetooth.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
Drop-In: /etc/systemd/system/bluetooth.service.d
└─override.conf
Active: active (running) since Mon 2020-08-03 18:29:42 EDT; 14s ago
Docs: man:bluetoothd(8)
Main PID: 3542 (bluetoothd)
Status: "Running"
CGroup: /system.slice/bluetooth.service
└─3542 /usr/lib/bluetooth/bluetoothd

Aug 03 18:29:42 Zorin bluetoothd[3542]: Not enough free handles to register service
Aug 03 18:29:42 Zorin bluetoothd[3542]: Not enough free handles to register service
Aug 03 18:29:42 Zorin bluetoothd[3542]: Not enough free handles to register service
Aug 03 18:29:42 Zorin bluetoothd[3542]: Current Time Service could not be registered
Aug 03 18:29:42 Zorin bluetoothd[3542]: gatt-time-server: Input/output error (5)
Aug 03 18:29:42 Zorin bluetoothd[3542]: Not enough free handles to register service
Aug 03 18:29:42 Zorin bluetoothd[3542]: Not enough free handles to register service
Aug 03 18:29:42 Zorin bluetoothd[3542]: Sap driver initialization failed.
Aug 03 18:29:42 Zorin bluetoothd[3542]: sap-server: Operation not permitted (1)
Aug 03 18:29:42 Zorin systemd[1]: Started Bluetooth service.

Found this interesting thread:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/298 ... rting-blue

It appears something to do with rfkill and power management - you can turn off power management and see if that helps - will try and find the post that came up on this regarding wifi.

See if disabling powermanagement as stated here helps:

https://serverfault.com/questions/32149 ... er-netbook

I think I have the issue resolved. Really I did so many things attempting to resolve this that I can't provide a definitive solution. I do know that I had to actually pair the usb dongle (BTD-400 from Kinivo) to the BOSE headset even though there was no evidence that the USB dongle was recognized by the machine. Go Figure. So after making sure bluez was running, it was not originally installed so I had to install it and then reboot the machine, I was able to get the BOSE and BTD to pair. BUT they would not connect. So ... google google google and maybe its because I need pulseaudio. I spend a bit of time trying to figure if pulseaudio is started when I should have first looked to see if it was installed. Dohhhhh. So I installed pulseaudio and now I can get the devices to pair and connect. Oh yes in there somewhere I had to use bluetoothctl to tell the machine to trust the Dongle or maybe the headphones...but I think the BTD-400 dongle. One person suggested powermanagement but I didn't go too far down that path as I am using a desktop that essentially never gets turned off. Due to right reasoning, or wrong, I didn't putz too much with power management. Zorin didn't seem to have very much to putz with. Best of luck to anyone with bluetooth issues on linux (I tried 3 or 4, lost track, other distributions before zorin and they all refused to make using the BTD-400 wprl with the BOSE headphones as simple as it should be. Oh, I almost forgot. I had to go out to a site with winterhaven in the name and get a hcd file so the firmware for bluetooth was correctly loaded at boot time. If you look around in dmesg you'll see evidence of a problem with the firmware needed to ensure bluetooth works. It will tell you exactly what it is and so you go find the hcd file for that and put it in, in my case, /lib/firmware/brcm and you are on to the next test in the quest.

Pros: Learned a lot about bluetoothctl, more about dmesg, a lot more about systemctl, practiced installing and removing software, lsusb and a host of other mystical linux incantations. Of the 3 or 4 distributions I tried none of them just worked so you can't call zorin out on this. It appears Linux et.al. sucks at bluetooth.

Cons: Really, shouldn't this just work. The machine is working fine, the BTD-400 is working fine and the BOSE headphones are working fine, now. I tested with Pandora and Youtube after I got the ballet of firmware, software, connection, trust and pairing done. I also tested the BTD-400 on my macbook, I use the headphones a lot with the macbook, and they paired up and worked so I was fairly certain from the git-go it wasn't a hardware problem with the BTD-400 / BOSE headphones.

Thanks for getting back to us. Let's also not forget that I suspect Linux has had to do a lot of reverse engineering when it comes to bluetooth! But you are correct in that BT can be a pain for Linux to sort out.

Just done a quick search myself and found this interesting reference site for general bluetooth isssues in Linux:

https://linux-sunxi.org/Bluetooth

jsweatte wrote:Pros: Learned a lot about bluetoothctl, more about dmesg, a lot more about systemctl, practiced installing and removing software, lsusb and a host of other mystical linux incantations. Of the 3 or 4 distributions I tried none of them just worked so you can't call zorin out on this. It appears Linux et.al. sucks at bluetooth.

Blueman is notorious.

I admit, when I went to set it up over a year ago, I ended up giving it up as a bad job. Never looked back.

Maybe it's time I had another go at it...






nah...