Bluetooth earphones working on FreeBSD

[balanga]

I'm thinking of buying some bluetooth earphones, but would prefer some which worked on FreeBSD,

Any recommendations?

I would like to use them with a ThinkPad W520 running FreeBSD 15.1.

 

[SirDice]

Everything supports A2DP nowadays, so that's not an issue. The bigger question is, does bluetooth itself work on the laptop?

 

[balanga]

Everything supports A2DP nowadays, so that's not an issue. The bigger question is, does bluetooth itself work on the laptop?

How do I tell?

I have a Lenovo bluetooth keyboard. How do I figure out if I can use it with my ThinkPad W520?

# hccontrol -n ubt0hci read_local_name

Local name: W520 (ubt0)

Not sure what else I can use too investigate the capabilities.

 

[elephant]

balanga Try this. Run bluetooth-config scan as root. Follow the prompts. This assumes bluetooth, hcsecd and bthidd are enabled in rc.conf (and maybe loader.conf).

Edit: when it prompts for a "pin", try either "0000" or nopin.

 

[balanga]

balanga Try this. Run bluetooth-config scan as root. Follow the prompts. This assumes bluetooth, hcsecd and bthidd are enabled in rc.conf (and maybe loader.conf).

Edit: when it prompts for a "pin", try either "0000" or nopin.

I don't have anything related to bluetooth in rc.conf

 

[blackbird9]

I got bluetooth working on my X220 a good few months ago, I was driving a little pair of battery bt speakers. I switched over to headphones and dacs and haven't bothered with bt for quite a long time now, but I did have it working.

 

[blackbird9]

Looks like I made some notes here.

Post in thread '[Bluetooth-audio] How to connect and use Bluetooth headphones on FreeBSD'

Aug 30, 2025

I have got this to work with AVSL (https://avsl.com) av:link soundshots mini-speakers and a thinkpad X201 which has an intel centrino 6300-N wifi bluetooth adapter. Sadly these little speakers are no longer made but they can still be found for sale online.

initial setup was:-

pkg install iwmbt-firmware virtual_oss
service devd restart
kldload cuse
sysrc kld_list+="cuse"

and in /etc/bluetooth/hosts make an alias 'soundshots' to the BDADDR for the speakers.

Then I run the following commands in a script.
service hcsecd onestart
service bluetooth start ubt0 # it always fails the...

• blackbird9

• 

And a photo here

Post in thread 'FreeBSD Screen Shots'

Sep 16, 2025

This is a slightly different screenshot, being my X201 using mpv to play a youtube Astrum movie fullscreen about the Vera Rubin telescope - this one.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tu4cpaDZ68g

The two round things near the front on the palm-rest are two mini bluetooth speakers, which I got working with freebsd following the bluetooth howto on this forum. These particular speakers are av:link soundshots from avsl,
see: https://www.avsl.com/assets/manuals/1/0/100620UK.pdf

This is a huge upgrade to the X201's built in...

• blackbird9

• 
• 

It was actually september last year. Since then I've been playing a lot more with dacs and headphones and the bt stuff has got left aside. I seem to remember it actually worked pretty well, I remember those speakers supported true stereo over bluetooth with freebsd on the X220, which was nice. I probably didn't get the whole setup fully completed though.

 

[astyle]

Just a reminder, Bluetooth is actually on the same card as Wi-Fi. Sometimes, it's really a matter of having proper wifi firmware, rather than a kitchen-sink catch-all generic variant of the firmware for the card.

 

[blackbird9]

My card in the X220 is a Centrino Advanced-N 6205, which is an old one. From the notes I made I installed 'iwmbt-firmware' package to get it to work, but I don't remember the details now, I think I found someone else's howto and started off with that, then wrote up those notes at the end when I got it working. The steps might be a bit different on 15.x. Anyway, it definitely worked, and in full stereo too. The pair of speakers get paired with each other first, and then it looks like a single device to bt on freebsd. I think the part I didn't get fully completed was figuring out what to put in rc.conf so that it got auto-configured at boot time.