Pairing airpods to Ubuntu 22.04

Intro: Once upon a time

For someone who barely identified to be in the top half of Rogers’ bell curve in the earlier days, Apple was still a fascinating brand. It may have been the subconsciousness from seeing the pretty logo behind a desktop sitting at an elementary school to the copyright-sensitive, brand-loving agents I was inspired from the Genius bars. No, of course it was the quality audio they produced.

Yet their products were not cheap, and deprecation of electronic devices was the norm. So I moved on in a path to gain financial independence. Just then when I was about to put the whole Apple ecosystem behind my past, iPhone minis were released. I found these to be affordable, and just the right size for my petite hand.

Then my bluetooth headphone, earbuds each broke of its own accord. The greatest contenders for this field were Samsung and Apple. In terms of better compatibility across android and iOS, Apple won in my reading. (cannot quote a highly reliable source) So I gave the 2nd generation a try

Challenge: connection with Ubuntu 22.04

Airpods was expensive, but boy do they sit in your ears. Then comes a challenge, more so because I am transitioning (in my mind mainly) to the upper percentage in the bell curve above. By this I regard the Ubuntu 22.04 on a Samsung laptop, the OS that has yet to celebrate a release anniversary.

This has given some glitches, one where easy, friendly GUI is blocked for airpods connection. So I tried all three parameters for ControllerMode in /etc/bluetooth/main.conf, to no avail.

I had to enter the shell with bluetoothctl command from the terminal.

The lines starting with blue, next to # are the commands. More here -> https://www.linux-magazine.com/Issues/2017/197/Command-Line-bluetoothctl. scan on will show the list of devices detected. It may not in your first try, but be patient. It will show in the format Device MAC-address proper_name.

When you see the proper name of the device on the RHS, c/p the MAC address on the LHS. Type with the command pair MAC-Address .

If it fails, the error message will let you know for you to retry. If it succeeds it will also.

Last add: Hope it helps

Ah, if all this does not work, maybe go to the configuration file and set the parameter active. Don´t forget to restart the service and reboot :)

sudo vim /etc/bluetooth/main.conf

ControllerMode=dual

sudo service restart bluetooth

reboot