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So it’s been a while since I last blogged about anything and today I’ve had a hell of a time with PulseAudio and Bluetooth and trying to find an actual solution to my woes (Jump to the guide).

I recently bought an Intel 7260AC Wireless and Bluetooth PCIe card for my laptop and also decided to try Linux as my main OS again. Now I prefer Debian as a distro but have found it to be a little stale in some aspects mainly surrounding it’s stable repos. I have in the past tried Ubuntu but it’s such a hassle removing the default crap like the horrid Unity Amazon integration and I dislike unity so that’s totally out of the question. I have however decided to try Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) as it’s 100% Debian testing compatible which is nice and actually cinnamon is a nice DM/GUI which has finally matured sufficiently.

Everything installed perfectly fine via the DVD and I was greeted with a very nice login manager (although I can see the screen refresh which I can’t be bothered to fix as its only a minor annoyance) and then a very simple and nice Cinnamon desktop manager. Cinnamon is a fork of GTK3+3 / GNOME developed for Mint with the classic gnome look and feel. The default layout is a single pane on the bottom of the screen and a menu bar, a few launcher icons, the task bar, notifications and a clock.

Everything surprisingly worked out of the box, including the WiFi, graphics and Bluetooth which are all things I’ve had issues with in the past.

The Problem…

But here comes my problem, I went to use one of my bluetooth speakers from my laptop to have a play around. I could pair the devices perfectly fine but then the laptop refused to use the bluetooth speakers as an output.

Now audio in linux isn’t an entirely simple affair and tracking down at what stage the fault was at was hard but I was fairly certain it was between PulseAudio and the bluetooth (Bluez), there is a packaged lib for pulseaudio and bluetooth called ‘pulseaudio-module-bluetooth’ which is reported to fix issues but it was already installed which meant the issue wasn’t with pulseaudio directly but something was meaning the modules were not being loaded correctly after the bluetooth was paired which wasn’t enabling the A2DP Sink, I tried manually loading the modules with no success.

I then stumbled across some posts about that discussed editing the way the bluetooth stack connects this involved editing a couple of core config files for bluetooth. I tried a couple of different configurations, some of which caused bluetooth to stop pairing all together but I finally found a working config.

The Solution…

So if you’re struggling to get a bluetooth speaker or headset to work after pairing it then try the following:

su
nano /etc/bluetooth/audio.conf

add the following underneath [General]

Disable=Socket
Enable=Media,Source,Sink,Gateway

Save & exit

service bluetooth restart

This allowed me to re-pair my device and have it show up correctly in PulseAudio.

So a couple of weeks back, I started my new job and one of the first issues that I was tasked with was to fix some printing issues.

The main issue was when somebody printed, was, it was missing out letters from the actual print out but only for certain documents and only ‘random’ computers.

After investigation, it was found that it was Windows XP based computers and the main letters that were missing was t and i if they were together ‘ti’ so for instance ‘Function’ printed as ‘Func  on’  other issues arose when specific characters were used such as \ and / etc.

We found a post on spiceworks that detailed the same problem and a post only containing single link to a Microsoft KB (KB2642020) article was actually the issue specifically with Windows Server 2008 Print Servers.

I popped the simple registry fix in via group policy and push to to Windows XP machines only via WMI filters.

The Group Policy looks like the following:

I received a demo/trial Meraki MR12 wireless access point today; here’s some photos of the unboxing and of the main PCB.

But seeing as you’re here, I’ll give you some basic facts and figures about Cher.

Cher is a singer/actress born in California USA, who has rose to fame over the last 40 years.

Cher’s initial career started in the early 1960’s with the help of Sonny Bono where they released songs under the Sonny and Cher name.

Buy Sonny and Cher on Amazon

In the 70’s Sonny and Cher starred in their own Television show named The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour but by the mid 70’s they had split up and Cher was trying to host the show on her own as well as a solo pop career (Gypsys, Tramps & Thieves).

During the 1980’s Chers career had continued to grow, now starring in Films (Witches of Eastwick, Mask, Silkwood etc) she also pushed her singing career, performing with the likes of Meat Loaf as well as her own solo career when by the late 80’s she had release a few hits such as If I could Turn Back Time and I Found Someone.

If I could Turn Back Time – Chers Greatest Hits on Amazon

Chers success continued into the 90’s and 2000’s. She played roles in more films (Moonstruck, Mermaids, Tea with Mussolini) and more songs such as believe.

The Very Best of Cher on Amazon

If you want to know more about Cher, try wikipedia that’s where I got my facts from.