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On a reasonably plain vanilla Debian 13 Mate install on two old laptops, how to use a bluetooth headset?

  • Laptop one is a Lenovo Thinkpad T440 laptop with a built-in bluetooth adapter
  • Laptop two is a Dell Latitude D830 using an ASUS USB bluetooth dongle

There are two parts to the problem:

  • Get the bluetooth system on the laptop to connect to the headset using a GUI
  • Get the audio system on the laptop to recognize that the headset exists and be able to switch to it with both the "speakers" and "mike" working in the headset

Both laptops use the invaluable Sound Switcher Indicator1 to select audio outputs and inputs.

Much googling and cut-n-trying later, I cannot find any place on the internet that concisely presents the whole solution.

1No affliation, just a fan.

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1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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Both laptops started off with the bluez and bluez-firmware packages plus their dependencies installed as part of the default trixie load.

To get the desired functionality, these three additional packages need to be installed:

  • blueman
  • pulseaudio-module-bluetooth
  • libspa-0.2-bluetooth

Then reboot the system.

Here endeth the fix, some notes follow.

Many internet posts talk about the first two packages in relation to this issue. Only a few mention the third package - this is the one that put me on to it. But none that I found concisely list all three sans various configuration file edits and other things that I did not end up having to do.

There is a package in trixie called bluetooth but it does not install any of the three required packages, so it was useless for my purposes.

This was tested with various cheap bluetooth headsets and they were able to connect, and then both receive and transmit audio.

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