Kubuntu and Bluetooth Audio

I just recently made a switch to Kubuntu to test out their integration of KDE4.4. I must admit that I like this version. It's very visually appealing and generally works very well. Post-installation, I realized however that I had a very serious problem: my bluetooth headphones wouldn't pair with it.

Now for those of you who don't know me, I'm a web developer and a systems admin for my company (and my house). If you know much about digital technology you also understand that tunes are an essential piece to forward motion on any project.

All this being said, I scowered the interwebz for a solution to my problem. Thanks to a few arbitrary links, I discovered that the bluetooth manger in KDE4.4,*, will not pair with audio devices (and a few other types, but those aren't important for the sake of this post), this includes bluetooth headsets to be used with software such as Skype.

Sadly, with all of that searching I discovered that there seems to be only one way to fix this: install the gnome bluetooth manager.

With that, let's get started!

Crack open a terminal and type in:

sudo apt-get install gnome-bluetooth pulseaudio pavucontrol

Here's that those packages do.


 * gnome-bluetooth: If it isn't already obvious, this is the gnome bluetooth manager.
 * pulseaudio : This line is in case you don't use pulseaudio for your KDE instance. Typically I believe KDE does not use pulseaudio. This is required because guess what! the KDE audio drivers don't support changing the output device from stereo to a bluetooth device.
 * pavucontrol: This is short for Pulse Audio ﻿Volume Control.

From here, put your bluetooth device in discoverable mode, open up gnome-bluetooth (should be a rather misfit icon in the taskbar), and connect to your device.

The second step in the process of connecting is telling your audio system to output to the headphones instead of the stereo. To do that, find the Pulse Audio Volume Control in your Kickoff menu and change your output to your bluetooth headset.

The final step in this is to enjoy some high quality (hopefully) wireless music with a 33 foot tether. Enjoy!