Linux and a Bluetooth Dongle

My and my partner have started sharing our office space, and I decided to get some Airpod Pros to help reduce some of the background noise.

The Airpods are great, but my computer has always struggled with Bluetooth headphones.

I figured I’d try and find a Linux friendly Bluetooth adapter to see if I could get something working.

The ASUS USB-BT500 has drivers for Linux, so I figured I’d give it a shot. The drivers didn’t install for me, however, I don’t believe they are needed; the only thing I had to do was disable the built-in Bluetooth, which then forced my computer to use the dongle.

Setup Guide

This guide is for anyone wanting to use this dongle (and it’s also for me when I update my OS).

1. We need to find out what your current Bluetooth device is. Running lsusb should show you the info we’ll need to disable your built-in adapter. For me, it was listed as:

   Bus 001 Device 005: ID 0b05:185c ASUSTek Computer, Inc. Bluetooth Radio
   

   This output contains the vendor and product IDs 0b05 & 185c. We’ll need these for the next step.

2. Block the built-in device from being used by your machine using a udev rule.

   To do that, create a file at /etc/udev/rules.d/81-bluetooth-hci.rules and add the following:

   SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="<Vendor ID>", ATTRS{idProduct}=="<Product ID>", ATTR{authorized}="0"
   

   For me, this would be:

   SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="0b05", ATTRS{idProduct}=="185c", ATTR{authorized}="0"
   

3. Reboot your machine, plug-in your new USB dongle, and you should be good to go.

References

This guide is a culmination of these to stack exchange questions:

• AskUbuntu
• Unix