Bluez fails on Raspberry Pi running Jessie Headless

Question

I've run out of tutorials and tricks that worked for others but not for me.

I'm trying to pair a remote bluetooth speaker with my PI Zero.

When I attempt to connect I get the error message:

[bluetooth]# connect XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX
Attempting to connect to XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX
Failed to connect: org.bluez.Error.Failed
[bluetooth]#

And the log reports:

org.bluez.Manager.GetProperties() failed: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.UnknownMethod: Method "GetProperties" with signature "" on interface "org.bluez.Manager" doesn't exist

I have no idea where to begin addressing that. The logs also report

Unable to contact D-Bus: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NotSupported: Unable to autolaunch a dbus-daemon without a $DISPLAY for X11

and

a2dp-sink profile connect failed for XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX: Protocol not available a2dp-source profile connect failed for XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX: Protocol not available

I'm sure there's useful information in there but every time I think I've googled a solution I'm disappointed. Moving the load of the discoverable module until after X11 load didn't work. Purging pulseaudio and reinstalling it didn't help. Any ideas?

brianfit · Answer 1 · 2018-03-25T11:39:08.997

Somewhere on some thread someone said that Pulseaudio had to be version 6.0 or greater, which led me down the rabbit hole of installing version 7, which broke on Jessie due to incompatible dependencies.

Ultimately I purged the following:

apt-get purge pulseaudio pulseaudio-module-bluetooth libpulse0

And reinstalled

apt-get install pulseaudio pulseaudio-module-bluetooth

I then unpaired the Alexa from the pi via the Alexa app on my phone and ran

bluetoothctl

[bluetooth]# remove XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX

Reboot and voilà, Pulseaudio running and paired on the Pi and working! Only issue I have now is that I can't seem to get it to start automatically on boot. I've added to /etc/rc.local:

su -c 'pulseaudio --start' - pi
echo connect XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX | bluetoothctl
su -c 'pacmd set-card-profile bluez_card.68_54_FD_82_A9_BF a2dp' - pi

Well, to be precise, it pairs automatically on boot, but then drops out. If I manually run

pulseaudio --start

and

bluetoothctl
[bluetooth]# power on 
[bluetooth]# agent on 
[bluetooth]# default-agent 
[bluetooth]# connect XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX

Then all works fine, stays rock solid. Despite the fact that I STILL have these error messages in the log:

cat /var/log/syslog | grep dbus

org.bluez.Manager.GetProperties() failed: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.UnknownMethod: Method "GetProperties" with signature "" on interface "org.bluez.Manager" doesn't exist

Unable to contact D-Bus: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NotSupported: Unable to autolaunch a dbus-daemon without a $DISPLAY for X11

Bluez fails on Raspberry Pi running Jessie Headless

1 Answers1