I have the bluetooth plugable adapter on two computers running Debian Jessie with kernel 3.16.0-4. Devices such as phone and mouse work well. Bluetooth head phones pair and connect, but the connection is lost immediately. This may be a firmware problem. The following shows the firmware doesn’t load even if it seems to be in the right place.
arl@strider-a:~$ dmesg | grep blue
[5.865894] bluetooth hci0: firmware: failed to load brcm/BCM20702A0-0a5c-21e8.hcd (-2)
[5.869656] bluetooth hci0: Direct firmware load failed with error -2
[5.869660] bluetooth hci0: Falling back to user helper
arl@strider-a:~$
arl@strider-a:~$ ls /lib/firmware/*.hcd
/lib/firmware/fw-0a5c_21e8.hcd
Thank you for posting your question. I’ve been able to use the adapter with Debian Jessie successfully, and while a firmware message is normal, it is usually different than what you are seeing.
We have a blog post on installing the firmware, which is proprietary, and therefore not included with Debian. Could you please try the instructions there? If this doesn’t help, let me know and we can look deeper for the problem:
Thanks for your reply. The web page you quote has a small error. The second option is listed for kernals 3.18 and newer. I have kernel 3.16 and had to use the second option with my bluetooth headphones. I finally got my head phones to work after several other set up problems.
Alvin
Thank you for letting us know. I reformatted the post when you contacted us, and I was a little suspicious about 3.18 too. I tested with a 3.16 kernel and had the same results you did. I’ll change it.