I have a very nice pair of headphones Bose QC35 and would like to connect it to my laptop running Fedora 29. It’s normally quite easy to pair up the headphones and the laptop when running Gnome or KDE as the desktop environment. But, how to do this from a minimal tiling windows manager such as i3? In this post, I’m going briefly show how one can do that.
First ensure that the bluetooth service is running:
$ sudo systemctl status bluetooth
On my Fedora 29, the bluetooth service is enabled and started automatically.
Next, confirm that bluetooth device is not blocked:
$ rfkill
ID TYPE DEVICE SOFT HARD
0 bluetooth tpacpi_bluetooth_sw unblocked unblocked
1 wlan phy0 unblocked unblocked
3 bluetooth hci0 unblocked unblocked
Again mine is not blocked. We can proceed to scan the headphones address.
$ bluetoothctl
Agent registered
# scan on
...
[CHG] Device 28:11:22:41:8B:E9 Name: LE-Bose QC35 II
[CHG] Device 28:11:22:41:8B:E9 Alias: LE-Bose QC35 II
[CHG] Device 28:11:22:41:8B:E9 TxPower: 4
[CHG] Device 28:11:22:41:8B:E9 Name: Bose QC35 II
[CHG] Device 28:11:22:41:8B:E9 Alias: Bose QC35 II
[CHG] Device 53:B0:16:73:DF:15 RSSI: -86
[CHG] Device 28:11:22:41:8B:E9 TxPower: -10
[CHG] Device 7F:E3:66:EB:15:18 ManufacturerData Key: 0x004c
[CHG] Device 7F:E3:66:EB:15:18 ManufacturerData Value: 10 02 0b 08
....
# scan off
Based on the output above, I could guess that my headphones QC35 has the address of 28:11:22:41:8B:E9. So, I don’t need to perform any more scanning. Stop scanning by running scan off.
The next step is to pair the headphones’ bluetooth connection with the laptop’s. On the QC35, hold the power on button for 3 seconds to activate the new connection to new device. Back to the laptop terminal and type:
# pair 28:11:22:41:8B:E9
Once paird, run one last command to connect both devices:
# connect 28:11:22:41:8B:E9
The sound starts to come out from the QC35. I haven’t checked if the headphones will be remembered and get connected automatically next time they’re turned on yet. I shall check this next time and will update this blog post according. Thanks to the Reddit post and the link can be found below.