EDIT: Upgraded to Maverick and everything works out of the box, like a charm, even without Pulseaudio! The only thing I still need Pulseaudio's volume control for is to switch between one-way high-quality A2DP and full-duplex low-quality on the fly!
Read on if you want to see how it was just a few months ago.
So I was trying to get my Bluetooth headset working on Linux. It was not easy... I used this guide, but using Blueman to pair my headset and connect audio to it. Unfortunately, .asoundrc and pactl still have to be typed in by hand. As a sidenote, if instead of "auto" you type "voice" in .asoundrc , the Pulseaudio volume control will let you graphically change whether you want one-way high-quality A2DP or full-duplex low-quality! However, this also seemed to change the sink name from "alsa_output.btheadset" to something with Bluez and your device MAC address, so just copy-paste the new entry from the manager instead of looking for that particular line. No big deal. Also, Blueman will keep saying that it cannot connect the audio source, but you can safely ignore that - it will work.
The plus side is that you can decide on-the-fly that this application should use the audio card and that one should use the Bluetooth headset. In practice, it means that you can have your music playing through the PC speakers while using your headset for audio conferencing, and then change your headset to A2DP mode and switch music playback there without even stopping your music. Pretty cool stuff.
I ended up ditching Pulseaudio some time ago. To me, it was a useless layer between the actual sound engine and the user. I'd just leave it there if it worked, but unfortunately, on all of my installations it would decide to just stop working eventually - and, off it goes. However, even though it's actually ALSA who gives audio to the new device, I cannot get it to appear in alsamixer or Phonon, so I had to reinstall Pulseaudio. If anyone has any clues as to why it might happen, I'd love to know!
If I had more free time, I'd write a few tools to automate A2DP and Bluetooth DUN [which, by the way, is yet another painful story - always configure your phone as a Bluetooth modem before you end up with no other Internet connection! You'll probably be able to connect rfcomm0 using Blueman, but mine didn't manage to dial up the connection afterwards. Graphical tools such as kppp somehow didn't work either, so I had to do a lot of experimenting with pon chatscripts.] However, since I probably won't actually sit down and code something meaningful, I'll just cross my fingers and hope that someone else will do it for me within a few years :)
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