Tired of having my co-workers laughing at me for not having skype set up (yes, I am still trying to figure out the internal mic) I decided to look into pairing my Samsung WEP170. The solution is pretty quick and dirty.

You’ll need to install several tools, which you can do without I’m not sure but here’s what I have installed so far to pair both my phone and the headset:

bluez-btsco
bluez-pin
bluez-utils
gnome-bluetooth
kdebluetooth
libbluetooth
libbtcl4
libgnomebt0
nautilus-sendto
qobex

For this exercise, though, we’ll be making use of bluez-btsco, bluez-pin, and kdebluetoothd. So after installing the packages modprobe btsco:

$ sudo modprobe snd-bt-sco

Turn on the headset and grab the MAC address:

$ hcitool scan

Copy it and get set up to enter the devices pin number when pairing:

$ passkey-agent –default /usr/bin/bluez-pin

In another terminal type the following with that MAC address you copied:

$ btsco -v BL:UE:TO:OT:HM:AC

Turn on the headset for pairing, in the case of the Samsung it means holding the power down until the light goes solid. If all goes well the passkey-agent should pop looking for the pin of the headset and once that is entered the device should pair and the little KBluetoothD icon should be in your notification area. To use it with Skype I just needed to configure it to use the headset which showed up as a secondary ALSA device with the prefix of BT.

Now, there are two ways to get your headset connected quickly one is to create a little script that issues the btsco command sans the -v and launch it whenever you turn the headset on or you can use the GUI tool found here but that requires you run it as sudo (or gksudo for pure, unadulterated GUI-ness). Other than that this is pretty easy, quick, and dirty.

Gratefully cribbed from this post and that post on Ubuntu forms as well as the discussion at the tool’s website.