Hack45.Use a Bluetooth Headset with Linux


Hack 45. Use a Bluetooth Headset with Linux

Use a Bluetooth-enabled headset to make VoIP calls or listen to music while wirelessly roaming throughout your house.

One of the coolest wireless technologies to come along recently is Bluetooth. Unlike its more well-known cousin, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth is not intended to be a networking protocol, though it can be used as one. Bluetooth was designed to fill a more mundane purposecable replacement. When Bluetooth devices are talking to one another (defined as pairing), they form a Personal Area Network (PAN). There are many Bluetooth-enabled devices today, including PDAs, headsets, cellphones, and computers.

I own quite a few devices that are Bluetooth-capable, and I've used several of them under Linux. One of the more difficult things I've tried is getting a Bluetooth headset working in Linux, because the software isn't quite there yet. After a good deal of experimentation, I've finally gotten this working.

This has been tested under Ubuntu Linux (Hoary Hedgehog release), kernel 2.6.10. In theory, it would also work with Debian Linux with little or no modification. For users of other distributions, these steps might give you enough information to get a Bluetooth headset working.

Here's what you'll need:

  • A Bluetooth headset (I'm using a Jabra BT250)

  • A Bluetooth adapter for your computer (I'm using a D-Link DBT-120 USB adapter)

  • The Bluez Bluetooth software stack and the associated development libraries installed:

    bluez-hcidump
    bluez-pin
    bluez-utils
    libbluetooth1 and libbluetooth1-dev
  • The source code for btsco, available at http://bluetooth-alsa.sourceforge.net and its dependencies:

    automake-1.7
    libasound2-dev (otherwise known as alsa-devel)
    A kernel with alsa enabled
    The source code for the above kernel

The btsco code is the magic that makes the headset work. To get the btsco source code you'll need to use CVS, as the developers of the code haven't yet released a stable tarball. To check out the code from CVS, use the following commands (no password is needed for the anonymous access):

 bill@excalibur:/usr/src$ cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sf.net:/cvsroot/  bluetooth-alsa login Logging in to :pserver:anonymous@cvs.sf.net:2401/cvsroot/bluetooth-alsa CVS password: bill@excalibur:/usr/src$ cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sf.net:/cvsroot/ bluetooth-alsa co btsco cvs checkout: Updating btsco 

The source code will then be checked out (downloaded) from the development server. You will see a bunch of status messages as the files are downloaded to your system. Once the files are downloaded, you'll need to build the program from the source. Don't panicit's a lot easier than it sounds. Let's get started on the build.

First, compile the code:

 bill@excalibur:/usr/src/btsco$ ./bootstrap bill@excalibur:/usr/src/btsco$ ./configure bill@excalibur:/usr/src/btsco$ make 

You'll need to be root (or have root permissions via sudo) for the next two steps:

 root@excalibur:/usr/src/btsco# make install root@excalibur:/usr/src/btsco# make maintainer-clean 

Next, you have to build the bluetooth-to-alsa kernel module.

 bill@excalibur:/usr/src/btsco$ cd kernel bill@excalibur:/usr/src/btsco/kernel$make  

You'll need to be root (or have root permissions via sudo) for the next three steps:

 root@excalibur:/usr/src/btsco/kernel# make install root@excalibur:/usr/src/btsco/kernel# depmod -e root@excalibur:/usr/src/btsco/kernel# make clean 

At this point everything should have built and installed properly. Now, we'll go through the configuration and basic playback steps.

To use the new code, first load the kernel module you built. Make sure that your Bluetooth hardware is online and ready to go. Load the module as root with modprobe:

 bill@excalibur:~# modprobe snd_bt_sco 

Verify that the module loaded:

 bill@excalibur:~$ dmesg | tail snd-bt-sco revision 1.6 $ snd-bt-sco: snd-bt-scod thread starting 

Next, configure the Bluetooth adapter for voice using hciconfig as root:

 bill@excalibur:~# hciconfig hci0 voice 0x0060 

Turn on the headset and prepare it to be paired with the computer. On my Jabra BT250, this is done by holding the power button until the headset beeps and the power LED illuminates with a solid blue light.

Since you haven't paired the headset and the computer yet; you'll need to run hcitool as root to scan for available Bluetooth devices:

 bill@excalibur:~# hcitool scan Scanning … 00:07:A4:03:26:5E JABRA 250 

Now, run btsco with the Bluetooth address of the headset as an argument.

 bill@excalibur:~$ btsco 00:07:A4:03:26:5E & 

btsco must run in the background as long as the headset is in use. This is the "helper" application that translates all the alsa calls across the Bluetooth protocol stack.


This should cause bluez-pin to pop up a Bluetooth PIN window where you can enter your PIN. I have populated the PIN with "0000"that is the default PIN for pairing a Jabra BT250. Your headset's PIN and pairing instructions may differ slightly.

Now that this is done, you should be able to successfully play a sound file to your headset:

 bill@excalibur:~$ aplay -B 1000000 -D plughw:Headset \  /usr/share/sounds/KDE_Logout.wav  

Now if you look at your /dev device tree, you'll see a new sound device:

 bill@excalibur:~$ ls -l /dev/dsp* crw-rw---- 1 root audio 14, 3 2005-07-07 14:11 /dev/dsp crw-rw---- 1 root audio 14, 19 2005-07-10 20:34 /dev/dsp1 

At this point, any ALSA-aware sound application will play through the headset if you configure it for /dev/dsp1. This works with audio-recording applications as well.

Now that you've gotten your Bluetooth headset working under Linux, you can start using it as a free IP phone with Skype [Hack #98] or another VoIP application! Have fun!

Bill Childers




Linux Multimedia Hacks
Linux Multimedia Hacks
ISBN: 596100760
EAN: N/A
Year: 2005
Pages: 156

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