How to pair legacy Bluetooth devices in Linux Mint 18.1 Cinnamon and Xfce

For a long time, I have had a problem with my bluetooth Canon X Mark  1 calculator mouse. It simply would not connect to my bluetooth. It would recognize it; it could scan it and find it, but it would not pair. After many hours of research and a lot of experimentation, I have discovered a very simple solution.

My mouse is an older bluetooth device which uses a pin to pair. When the device does not give you a pairing pin to put in, the default pin is often 0000. I know that this is the case with my mouse, because that's how I would pair it on Linux Mint 16 (and it connects easily).


Now, in Linux Mint 18.1 (Xfce in the demo, but these steps also apply to Cinnamon), when you try to use either the default Blueberry bluetooth manager or the popular Blueman manager, it simply does not work.

Blueberry will not set up the mouse. Even worse, when you try again, it will start just throwing errors and not even attempt to connect. I am not sure if this is related to a problem with the package Bluez, where entering a pin causes a segmentation fault, but the result is clear - it does not work for my device.

Alright, so here is the solution.

Before you begin, you may want to install Blueman if you have not already. It is not strictly necessary to do so, and you can always install Blueman later, but it may make things more simple.

1. Stop messing with it, and reboot the computer (if you have tried to pair, your Bluetooth manager may thwart your ability to connect for the rest of your session).

2. Open up your terminal, and enter the bluetoothctl command.

3.  Instruct your device to pair (it is a small button under my mouse), and enter scan on

4. Once your computer has found some devices, enter scan off

5. Now, in order to figure out which devices are what, you can enter the command devices and it will display a little bit more information.

6. I am trying to pair my Canon X Mark I Mouse, so I will enter connect 00:12:A1:65:BE:71

This will result in a screen that looks like this:

and your device should be working.

7. Now, if you pull up Blueberry with your bluetooth mouse, you will notice that your bluetooth mouse is still not set up. This is obviously wrong, and if you try to click on it to set it up, it will break the connection and you have to start over from step 1.

The way that I dealt with this was to uninstall Blueberry and install Blueman. This is your choice. You can uninstall it, remove the applet, or just ignore it. I find Blueman does everything Blueberry does and more, so I opted to remove Blueberry completely and install Blueman.

8. You are almost done. Reboot the computer again, and try to use your device. It may ask you to Authenticate your bluetooth device:

Choose "Always Accept". Now if you reboot your computer again, your device should be working.

 Blueman recognizes my device and says it's connected. My device works.

If it does not automatically work after the reboot, try going through the steps again with Blueman running.

You can use Blueman then to pair with other non-legacy devices the normal way.

I hope this helps! Let me know in the comments!