[ltp] Bluetooth and awesome audio

[John Jason Jordan]

I have almost everything working fine on my T61 with Gutsy amd64. There remains a problem with wireless, but it is due to a bug in the iwl4965 driver, which Intel is working on. Meantime I want to post here how I got sound out of my new Sony DR-BT50 bluetooth headphones. Bluetooth is working fine and I managed to get the headphones paired up using Blueman. Blueman is not in the Ubuntu repositories, but you can download it and install it with Gdebi. However, although I got the headphones paired up fine, for a long time I couldn't get sound (e.g., from Rhythmbox) out of the headphones instead of the speakers or the headphone jack. I found the secret here:

http://wiki.bluez.org/wiki/HOWTO/AudioDevices#Alsaconfiguration

I had to make a file ~/.asoundrc and put into it:

pcm.bluetooth {
	type bluetooth
	device 00:13:A9:B2:82:5F
}

Where the device is the address listed in Blueman. 

After getting the headphones paired up I found another item in the volume control dialog box. Previously under File > Change Device it listed "HDA Intel (Alsa mixer)" and "Analog Devices AD1984 (OSS Mixer)." Now there is a new one, "BT Headset (Alsa Mixer)." After checking it and making the .asoundrc file the headphones are working perfectly. The sound from these headphones is awesome. If you are a serious music fan you won't be disappointed.

I also have the volume buttons working (since flashing the BIOS). They work fine for controlling the sound from the speakers and the headphone jack, but they don't have any effect on the headphones. Oh well, the volume controls on the headphones work fine, and that is all I need.