In short I installed pulseaudio-bluetooth and now I don’t get any audio from my web browser (nor do any youtube videos play). I have no idea how to revert this and I’m getting close to my wits end with the curse that is bluetooth.
Context:
I was (unsurprisingly) having issues with bluetooth with headphones that have previously connected multiple times without issue but now started displaying the error “br-connection-key-missing” in my bluetooth GUI. Looking around online I found that it could possibly be an issue with pulseaudio and pipewire.
I installed pulseaudio-bluetooth, which said it had a conflict with pipewire-pulse but continued the installation which is where I’m assuming was my massively stupid mistake.
Specifically I installed pulseaudio-bluetooth, restarted the bluetooth service, ran systemctl –user enable pulseaudio.service, and systemctl –user start pulseaudio-x11.service. Restarted bluetooth again and even rebooted.
Now I have no audio in my web browsers or VLC, but if I play an mp3 file in terminal with mplayer I hear it just fine. Same for testing system audio I can hear that no problem. And bluetooth is still giving me “br-connection-key-missing” like the blue middle finger it is.
So my dumbass just wants to know how do I unscrew this and just get back to where I was before I hit screwit and dump the OS? I’ve tried running sudo pacman -S pipewire-pulse and have pacman resolve this but I get the error :: pipewire-pulse-1:1.4.8-2 and pulseaudio-17.0+r43+g3e2bb8a1e-1 are in conflict. Remove pulseaudio? [y/N] y error: failed to prepare transaction (could not satisfy dependencies) :: removing pulseaudio breaks dependency ‘pulseaudio=17.0+r43+g3e2bb8a1e-1’ required by pulseaudio-bluetooth
goddmanit I knew it would be something embarrassingly simple like this. I’m so fried with trying to deal with the unmitigated disaster that is bluetooth. Thank you for the wildly fast and concise response. Bluetooth’s still ██████ “not working”. But at this point I’m just glad my audio’s back.
No problem, but I think I might have found out at least the cause to why I was getting “b-connection-key-missing”. After taking a break I found that it does in fact matter that I’m running a dual-booted system, even if each OS is on its own separate drive. At one point I’d booted into windows for something and ever since I booted back to linux I hadn’t use my bluetooth earbuds till now which, a sort of fix is to untrust and forget the bluetooth device and then re-pair. Annoying but I’m not planning on using windows very often these days so for now I’m alright not changing that. (also I am mildly afraid to touch bluetooth and risk it detonating again so soon lmao)
This is annoying, but it is sort of normal behaviour for bluetooth devices , because it will get an address in (this case) Windows that is stored in the memory of the BT device, and that address will not be recognized when being in e.g. linux , so you have to get a new address by re-pairing the device in linux. Therefore there are BT mice available where you can store 2 or more addresses in.
Preach lol. Ironically in windows I can’t remove the bluetooth device, even in device manager. But that’s getting too off-topic now. Thanks again for the fast help. That was one of my more erratic OP posts on a forum
huh, that’s actually really interesting and good to know! I probably should actually learn how bluetooth works behind the scenes one of these days. Know your enemy or whatever the line is lol. But yeah, I figure there is actual intelligent decisions to how bluetooth was made. I know I’m nowhere near as smart as the people who actually created/maintain the standard. It’s just a special kind of frustrating when bluetooth does “bluetooth things” and causes madness for gremlins like me.
Know your enemy or whatever the line is lol. But yeah, I figure there is actual intelligent decisions to how bluetooth was made. I know I’m nowhere near as smart as the people who actually created/maintain the standard. It’s just a special kind of frustrating when bluetooth does “bluetooth things” and causes madness for gremlins like me.