Unable to sync my bluetooth earphones with my laptop

Question

I am getting this error

Connection Failed: blueman.bluez.errors.DBusFailedError: Protocol not available

I tried several solutions like reinstall blueman

And PulseAudio can not load bluetooth module 15.10/16.04/16.10

But nothing works for me. Below are the list of things which are installed

 dpkg -l | grep bluetooth
ii  blueman                                    2.0.4-1ubuntu2                               amd64        Graphical bluetooth manager
ii  bluetooth                                  5.37-0ubuntu5.1                              all          Bluetooth support
ii  gnome-bluetooth                            3.18.2-1ubuntu2                              amd64        GNOME Bluetooth tools
ii  indicator-bluetooth                        0.0.6+16.04.20160526-0ubuntu1                amd64        System bluetooth indicator.
ii  libbluetooth3:amd64                        5.37-0ubuntu5.1                              amd64        Library to use the BlueZ Linux Bluetooth stack
ii  libgnome-bluetooth13:amd64                 3.18.2-1ubuntu2                              amd64        GNOME Bluetooth tools - support library
ii  pulseaudio-module-bluetooth                1:8.0-0ubuntu3.10                            amd64        Bluetooth module for PulseAudio sound server

dmesg | egrep -i 'blue|firm'; pactl list short | grep blue

[    0.026790] Spectre V2 : Enabling Restricted Speculation for firmware calls
[    0.197041] [Firmware Bug]: ACPI: BIOS _OSI(Linux) query ignored
[    5.599950] usb 2-4: Product: Bluetooth Radio 
[   15.219353] Bluetooth: Core ver 2.21
[   15.219366] Bluetooth: HCI device and connection manager initialized
[   15.219369] Bluetooth: HCI socket layer initialized
[   15.219372] Bluetooth: L2CAP socket layer initialized
[   15.219376] Bluetooth: SCO socket layer initialized
[   15.690338] Bluetooth: hci0: rtl: examining hci_ver=06 hci_rev=000b lmp_ver=06 lmp_subver=8723
[   15.690341] Bluetooth: hci0: rtl: loading rtl_bt/rtl8723b_fw.bin
[   15.849210] rtl8723be: Using firmware rtlwifi/rtl8723befw.bin
[   15.946331] Bluetooth: hci0: rom_version status=0 version=1
[   29.075249] Bluetooth: BNEP (Ethernet Emulation) ver 1.3
[   29.075253] Bluetooth: BNEP filters: protocol multicast
[   29.075257] Bluetooth: BNEP socket layer initialized
[   98.470379] Bluetooth: RFCOMM TTY layer initialized
[   98.470389] Bluetooth: RFCOMM socket layer initialized
[   98.470395] Bluetooth: RFCOMM ver 1.11

OS- ubuntu 16.04 Earphone - Tagg inferno(https://www.amazon.in/Inferno-Wireless-Bluetooth-Earphone-Carry/dp/B01M9DROES)

Answer 1

The solution from this article worked for me:

1. Make sure this package is installed

   sudo apt-get install pulseaudio-module-bluetooth
   

2. Run the command

   pactl load-module module-bluetooth-discover
   

Then delete the device from bluetooth devices and pair it again.

If it works, you can consider adding the second command to your startup settings, so that you don't have to run it again after every reboot.

Answer 2

What did work for me was this: (as pointed above by the other answer)

$ sudo apt-get purge pulseaudio  
$ rm ~/.config/pulse && sudo killall pulseaudio  
$ sudo apt-get install pulseaudio  
$ pulseaudio --start

The above to ensure pulse is working first.
Then, this one, which is a bit weird that doesn't come by default with pulseaudio itself:

$ sudo apt-get install pulseaudio-module-bluetooth  
$ pactl load-module module-bluetooth-discover  

A bit redundant I know, but these were the exact steps that worked for me 10 minutes ago.
But OK, at least it works now :)