I have another issue that appears to be in the realm of the sound system, this time on my laptop. I am running OpenSuSE 15.6 with the KDE/Plasma desktop.
I recently acquired a set of Bluetooth hearing aids and thought, wouldn't it be nice to be able to connect them to my laptop, so that I could listen to AudioBooks or music, without disturbing my wife while working on the laptop. After a bit of head scratching, cursing, etc I got the Bluetooth connection between my hearing aids and the laptop working. (At least according the the Bluetooth widget in the kicker bar) Trouble is, there is no device for my hearing aids showing up in the list of devices my sound system knows about. I installed pavucontrol to see if it saw anything related to a Bluetooth connection to my hearing aids in it's list of output devices, but no it doesn't, only shows my laptop's "Raptor Lake-P/U/H cAVS Pro" sound devices. So no joy getting sound directed to my hearing aids.
From my internet searches I found a few suggestions saying don't use the Pulseaudio drivers with Bluetooth devices, but instead use the Pipewire drivers, so I have switched my laptop over to using Pipewire but still no joy. I checked the kernel messages for errors but nothing significant showed up there -
# dmesg | grep Bluetooth [ 6.616455] Bluetooth: Core ver 2.22 [ 6.616478] Bluetooth: HCI device and connection manager initialized [ 6.616482] Bluetooth: HCI socket layer initialized [ 6.616484] Bluetooth: L2CAP socket layer initialized [ 6.616485] Bluetooth: SCO socket layer initialized [ 6.746371] Bluetooth: hci0: Device revision is 0 [ 6.746383] Bluetooth: hci0: Secure boot is enabled [ 6.746388] Bluetooth: hci0: OTP lock is enabled [ 6.746392] Bluetooth: hci0: API lock is enabled [ 6.746396] Bluetooth: hci0: Debug lock is disabled [ 6.746404] Bluetooth: hci0: Minimum firmware build 1 week 10 2014 [ 6.746405] Bluetooth: hci0: Bootloader timestamp 2019.40 buildtype 1 build 38 [ 6.747644] Bluetooth: hci0: DSM reset method type: 0x00 [ 6.785281] Bluetooth: hci0: Found device firmware: intel/ibt-0040-0041.sfi [ 6.785291] Bluetooth: hci0: Boot Address: 0x100800 [ 6.785292] Bluetooth: hci0: Firmware Version: 91-33.24 [ 8.264829] Bluetooth: hci0: Waiting for firmware download to complete [ 8.265480] Bluetooth: hci0: Firmware loaded in 1445503 usecs [ 8.265546] Bluetooth: hci0: Waiting for device to boot [ 8.282317] Bluetooth: hci0: Device booted in 16413 usecs [ 8.282318] Bluetooth: hci0: Malformed MSFT vendor event: 0x02 [ 8.286451] Bluetooth: hci0: Found Intel DDC parameters: intel/ibt-0040-0041.ddc [ 8.288321] Bluetooth: hci0: Applying Intel DDC parameters completed [ 8.291344] Bluetooth: hci0: Firmware timestamp 2024.33 buildtype 1 build 81755 [ 94.927759] Bluetooth: BNEP (Ethernet Emulation) ver 1.3 [ 94.927762] Bluetooth: BNEP filters: protocol multicast [ 94.927765] Bluetooth: BNEP socket layer initialized [ 94.928631] Bluetooth: MGMT ver 1.22 [ 125.869741] Bluetooth: RFCOMM TTY layer initialized [ 125.869749] Bluetooth: RFCOMM socket layer initialized [ 125.869753] Bluetooth: RFCOMM ver 1.11My internet research says that the one anomaly showing up - Malformed MSFT vendor event: 0x02 is nothing to worry about. It is caused by a driver not clearing a normal event signal and wrongfully putting it on a stack where higher layers in the sound subsystem don't know what to do with it. There is a patch and write-ups about it at
https://github.com/bluez/bluez/issues/877
I have installed the following packages, as suggested by my internet research -
bluezpipewire
pipewire-pulseaudio
(and all dependent packages)
I read the wiki at https://en.opensuse.org/Bluetooth but found it unhelpful. I suspect it's rather out of date. (seems to talk about stuff that does not apply or exist on my system)
Does anyone have any ideas on why my Bluetooth hearing aids are not showing up as sound output capable devices? Got me stumped and as always my gratitude and thanks for helping me solve this little problem...
Marc..