MW

Logitech Mini Boombox on Linux

Two of my friends gave me the Logitech Mini Boombox for my birthday. While it can be used with a plain old jack cable, it also supports Bluetooth. I don’t have a smartphone, but my laptop has Bluetooth support, so lets try it out, shall we?

First, we have of course to install all the required software packages. On Archlinux that was all pulled in by installing the bluedevil package. We could now theoretically start Bluetooth already and connect to the device, but lets fix a problem first: Pulseaudio integration: See this Gentoo wiki page, essentially you have to add a Enable=Socket line to the [General] section of your /etc/bluetooth/audio.conf file.

Now, start Bluetooth via /etc/rc.d/bluetooth start 1 and head over to the Bluetooth section in systemsettings. There you should be able to connect to the Boombox using “Add device”. Once that’s done, go to the Multimedia section in systemsettings and prefer the new boombox audio device over your built-in hardware devices. Then, don’t forget to go to the “Audio Hardware Setup” tab, select the Boombox in the “Sound Card” combobox and finally choose the “High Fidelity Playback (A2DP)” profile. If you don’t do that, the audio quality will be abysmal!

Cheers, it should work now. If the Boombox is not connected, your built-in hardware will be used. If you connect the Boombox, the audio device will automatically be switched over and you can enjoy much louder music compared to cheesy laptop speakers.


  1. On Archlinux, if you want to have the daemon running automatically when you restart your machine, don’t forget to add it to the DAEMONS list in /etc/rc.conf.

Comments

Want to comment? Send me an email!

Published on August 21, 2012.