Bose QC35 fails to connect to XPS 15 9550 running Arch

Question

I am struggling with making my Bose Quiet Comfort 35 headset work on my XPS 15 9550 running Arch Linux. The headset works on my other computer (also running Arch), but I just can't figure out how to make it work on this laptop...

I first installed pulseaudio-bluetooth, bluez, bluez-libs and bluez-utils, then enabled and started the bluetooth service, without errors. I then set "ControllerMode=bredr" in "/etc/bluetooth/main.conf", restarted bluetooth and attempted to pair using blutoothctl. This failed, and led me to believe some firmware was missing. Installing bluez-firmware changed nothing, so I downloaded and installed the firmware for my card: aur.archlinux.org/bcm20702a1-firmware.

The headset pairs and connects now, but the connection is always and immediately dropped:

Device 04:52:C7:77:81:E3 Bose QuietComfort 35
[CHG] Device 04:52:C7:77:81:E3 Connected: yes
[CHG] Device 04:52:C7:77:81:E3 Connected: no

The same thing happens when using "blueman-applet", with the following error:

Connection Failed: blueman.bluez.errors.DBusFailedError: Input/output error...

In journalctl the following error appears:

Aug 20 21:38:18 duty bluetoothd[317]: Endpoint replied with an error: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.AccessDenied

Running "blueman-applet" as sudo reports the following error:

dbus.exceptions.DBusException: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NotSupported: Using X11 for dbus-daemon autolaunch was disabled at compile time, set your DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS instead

Running "bluetoothctl" as sudo yields the connection followed by immediate disconnection result.

I've tried following suggestions from similar threads and mess around with "/etc/bluetooth/audio.conf", but to no effect.

I'm guessing it's a problem related to "pulseaudio-bluetooth", but am unable to debug any further, as I don't know what else can be done, nor where to look for more detailed error reports.

Might be worth noting that running "sudo pactl load-module module-bluetooth-discover" yields the following errors:

Connection failure: Connection refused
pa_context_connect() failed: Connection refused

Any help is much appreciated...

Answer 1

You might be missing notification daemons.

I believe this to be the case because blueman seems to be relying on system notifications instead of a regular dialog box for pairing devices. And you don't mention seeing any notifications.

See this question, where I luckily had one, but its notifications had no Confirm/Deny buttons.

Edit: another answer seems to be more complete (showing you the mechanism of Unity notifications).

In short: install notification-daemon (from Gnome) or some other notification daemon, then make sure it starts on startup, then restart.