Help with Bluetooth
Tofloor
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brianjskier
deepin
2016-08-08 15:19
Author
Hi everyone
I just installed the latest Deepin 15.2
It's really smooth so far, I like it.
But I'm struggling to get my bluetooth up and running.
It shows up in the control center and appears to be on, but never finds any available devices.
A driver issue makes the most sense.
Driver Manager says I'm using a broadcom BCM43142 802.11b with bcmwl-kernel--source for wifi, but only gives me one option for drivers to use and doesn't even mention bluetooth. This card has both wifi and bluetooth. The wifi works great, but the bluetooth not at all.
Is there another driver package that might do it?
How can I get it to appear?
The Deepin store has no results for Bluetooth at all! That seems strange. Do I have to allow it online access? How is that done?
Finally how can I open terminal in this new version?
I don't even see it.
Thanks for giving some help to a new user if you can
Brian
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stevex
deepin
2016-08-08 15:52
#1
Edited by stevex at 2016-8-8 08:24

The Deepin terminal can be found in your applications--click on the rocketship on the far left of the dock and that will load the applications. I've no help for the bluetooth problem, except to say the Debian forum might be of help. Oh,forgot to ask what, if anything, shows up in bluetooth settings in the control center when you click on the dropdown arrow there? My connected bluetooth speaker shows up, yet it is not listed there until I click on that arrow. Good luck.
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brianjskier
deepin
2016-08-11 12:54
#2
Hi stevex thanks for answering my posts so quicky.
If anyone else is wondering, I was able to mostly work this one out
My wifi card (broadcom BCM43142 802.11b) also has a bluetooth transmitter/receiver, which was not automatically enabled by the default driver.
dmesg told me that it couldn't find the firmware (bmc.hcd)
A google search form Broadcom BCM43142 firware .hcd led me to an ubuntu forum thread with this link:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/f503f6r686riiow/fw-105b_eo65.hcd
Which is the firmware hcd file.
With this deepin distro, it needs to be renamed bcm.hcd and placed into /lib/firmware/brcm/
A reboot, and bluetooth works!
Hopefully that's helpful to someone else.
Now I'm just fiddling with pulseaudio settings to try to eliminate the occasional annoying skip when playing music.
Any suggestions there would be appreciated
thanks!
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stevex
deepin
2016-08-11 14:04
#3
https://bbs.deepin.org/post/31339
Hi stevex thanks for answering my posts so quicky.
If anyone else is wondering, I was able to mostly ...

Way to go. Your fix probably will help others. Concerning the Pulse audio issue, have you considered a new needle? Sorry, could not help myself. There's probably someone on the forum who will help you out. Good luck.
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brianjskier
deepin
2016-08-13 10:27
#4
Turns out bluetooth and wifi tend to argue with each other in this hardware setup, I guess because they're on the same network card.
Turning wifi off yields perfect bluetooth audio.
That's great for most applications, but what about streaming?
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stevex
deepin
2016-08-13 12:47
#5
Hi. An easy work around might be to plug in, if you have one, a wifi adapter or dongle, which if it works, may not argue with your bluetooth. Another way would be to install synaptic package manager ( sudo apt-get install synaptic), which will show up as an app in your apps. Open it and click on" not" installed packages and then scroll to your bcm 43142 package, which I saw  listed there, and see if installing it helps or not. Caveat: I'm no expert on these matters; so it may or may not be risky. Good luck.
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brianjskier
deepin
2016-08-17 13:20
#6
Hi Stevex thanks for being the only one to reply to my posts and for coming back so quickly
I really appreciate it!
My struggle to get bluetooth to cooperate goes on.
After getting it to work well as long as wifi was off, I moved on to getting HDMI audio to work, as it didn't automatically enable.
Some research led me to install Pulseaudio Volume Control, a gui for pulseaudio.
This let me select HDMI and it instantly worked.
Fantastic!
Except that the next time I restarted my computer, bluetooth didn't load at all.
Even the bluetooth section of the control panel didn't appear.
Trying to start Blueman yielded the error
Bluez Daemon is not running
Hmmm. Somehow pulseaudio volume manager wiped out the start bluetooth commmand.
More research led me to remove and reinstall Bluez, and also to add pulseaudio-module-bluetooth (how in the world did it work without this before?)
So it turns out in Deepin, if you reinstall Bluez, it wipes out Deepin Desktop Environment , so I had nothing but a command prompt on the next restart.
Having been to this dark place before, I knew already to reinstall DDE.
Then bluetooth worked again, for a while.
Now, after watching another movie with HDMI, it is gone again.
Any ideas what might be going on?
How can I launch the control panel bluetooth manager?
Thanks again!
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stevex
deepin
2016-08-17 16:31
#7
Hello.  http://metricrat.co.uk/xubuntu-b ... ction-audioheadset/ May or may not help.  Or you might try installing "Blueman" with synaptic package manager, but do not know if it is safe to do so. The Ubuntu forum has many discussions that deal with your problem, and since  Ubuntu is based on Debian the solutions might apply.  What a hassle to connect a bluetooth device! Good luck.
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brianjskier
deepin
2016-08-18 03:16
#8
That did help!
turns out rfkill was the culprit.
Seems pulseaudio somehow changes those settings.
sudo rfkill list all
showed a soft block on bluetooth after changing things around in pulseaudio volume control.
sudo rfkill unblock bluetooth
did the trick
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