Gfilui

Since this morning I have been unable to connect my bluetooth headset to my ubuntu Gnome 16.04 machine. It was working fine just yesterday.

Now whenever I try to pair/connect to my computer, it pairs but fails to connect.

message on /var/log/syslog file:

Mar 5 14:59:28 Mijolnir bluetoothd[833]: a2dp-sink profile connect failed for 00:25:DB:70:00:F2: Protocol not available

output of [bluetooth]# info <MAC>:

Device 00:25:DB:70:00:F2
 Name: G-CUBE BH-860
 Alias: G-CUBE BH-860
 Class: 0x240404
 Icon: audio-card
 Paired: yes
 Trusted: yes
 Blocked: no
 Connected: no
 LegacyPairing: no
 UUID: Headset (00001108-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb)
 UUID: Audio Sink (0000110b-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb)
 UUID: A/V Remote Control Target (0000110c-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb)
 UUID: A/V Remote Control (0000110e-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb)
 UUID: Handsfree (0000111e-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb)
 RSSI: -50

output of [bluetooth]# show:

Controller A0:88:69:CC:48:9E
 Name: Mijolnir
 Alias: Mijolnir
 Class: 0x000000
 Powered: yes
 Discoverable: yes
 Pairable: yes
 UUID: Generic Attribute Profile (00001801-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb)
 UUID: A/V Remote Control (0000110e-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb)
 UUID: OBEX File Transfer (00001106-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb)
 UUID: Generic Access Profile (00001800-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb)
 UUID: OBEX Object Push (00001105-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb)
 UUID: PnP Information (00001200-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb)
 UUID: A/V Remote Control Target (0000110c-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb)
 UUID: IrMC Sync (00001104-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb)
 UUID: Vendor specific (00005005-0000-1000-8000-0002ee000001)
 UUID: Message Notification Se.. (00001133-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb)
 UUID: Phonebook Access Server (0000112f-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb)
 UUID: Message Access Server (00001132-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb)
 Modalias: usb:v1D6Bp0246d0525
 Discovering: yes

output to rfkill list:

0: hci0: Bluetooth
 Soft blocked: no
 Hard blocked: no
1: phy0: Wireless LAN
 Soft blocked: no
 Hard blocked: no

Can someone show me the light on how to tackle this issue?

So after some digging, I have found that there were problems with pulseaudio and bluez.. something to do with the protocols which were delegated to gstreamer but I can't seem to find the post where I read this. something must have broken with the latest update, because I had my bluetooth working fine the day before

Anyway.. what solved this for me was purging pulseaudio and reinstalling it. as per this post:

$ sudo apt-get purge pulseaudio
$ sudo apt-get clean && sudo apt-get autoremove
$ sudo apt-get install pulseaudio*
$ sudo alsa force-reload
$ pavucontrol

And reboot.

I had tried purging and reinstalling only pulseaudio bluetooth module. But that had not solved the issue for me. So in the step where I installed pulseaudio, note I installed pulseaudio*. This installs all pulseaudio modules, including bluetooth.
You don't actually need to run pavucontrol, as you may need to install it. All it does for us here, effectively, is restart pulseaudio. I decided to install it because it has more utilities and setting options for pulseaudio.

The post suggests some more tweaking. but pairing/connection problems were solved for me after the reboot, so I never got to that.

A previous issue I had with pulseaudio presented itself right after I reinstalled it, where a2dp would not be recognised. If it happens to you, check this post for a fix.

Everything is working as expected now.