When my son’s Apple Airpods case stopped charging after 3 years of use, I had to find a cheaper alternative until I received a new charging case. Additionally, I needed affordable, wireless earbuds that I could use while DIYing or cooking.

After doing a little research, I found a lot of positive comments about the A90 Pro wireless earbuds, which you can buy on Amazon for around £20.

A90 Pro

When new Apple Airpods case has been reunited with airpods, A90 Pro earbuds has been hnaded to me. I use these headphones with my iPhone when I need freedom of movement (if not, I use wired Beats), but I recently caught a cold and had to spend some time in bed, so I thought it would be nice to use wireless headphones with my Linux laptop while watching movies. When I’m working, I use the Sennheiser HD 202 wired headphones with my laptop, but when I’m some distance away from the monitors, I find it more convenient to use wireless headphones.

Unfortunately, my first attempts on both of my Linux Mint laptops ended in failure. The situation was the same on both systems – the systems detected the Bluetooth headphones, but pairing them failed.

I started searching online and found that it should be relatively simple. Generally, all I had to do was set a single parameter in the Bluetooth service configuration file and restart the service.

Configuration

To get my A90 Pro earbuds to work with my two Linux laptops I had to edit /etc/bluetooth/main.conf file and setup ControllerMode paramater to bredr:

# Restricts all controllers to the specified transport. Default value
# is "dual", i.e. both BR/EDR and LE enabled (when supported by the HW).
# Possible values: "dual", "bredr", "le"
ControllerMode = bredr

Then restart service systemctl restart bluetooth and start bluetooth paring process:

• Open the Bluetooth device management app on your laptop
• Start searching for Bluetooth devices
• Trust A90 Pro earbuds
• Pair them with laptop

I first tried this on my Linux Mint 22.1 “Xia” laptop and the whole process went smoothly. My second laptop is running Linux Mint 21.3. After restarting the Bluetooth service, I checked the kernel ring buffer messages using the dmesg command and saw the following errors:

Bluetooth: hci0: BCM20702A1 (001.002.014) build 0000
Bluetooth: hci0: BCM: firmware Patch file not found, tried:
Bluetooth: hci0: BCM: 'brcm/BCM20702A1-413c-8143.hcd'
Bluetooth: hci0: BCM: 'brcm/BCM-413c-8143.hcd'

After searching the internet, I found that I needed to install Broadcom Bluetooth firmware for my Bluetooth device (BCM20702A1) located in my laptop. I downloaded this firmware from GitHub webiste https://github.com/winterheart/broadcom-bt-firmware. I did everything by running the following commands:

cd /tmp
wget https://github.com/winterheart/broadcom-bt-firmware/releases/download/v12.0.1.1105_p4/broadcom-bt-firmware-12.0.1.1105.deb
sudo dpkg -i ./broadcom-bt-firmware-12.0.1.1105.deb
sudo systemctl restart bluetooth

dmesg was clear this time:

[Tue Dec  9 00:12:49 2025] Bluetooth: hci0: BCM20702A1 (001.002.014) build 0000
[Tue Dec  9 00:12:49 2025] Bluetooth: hci0: BCM20702A1 'brcm/BCM20702A1-413c-8143.hcd' Patch
[Tue Dec  9 00:12:50 2025] Bluetooth: hci0: DW1550 Bluetooth 4.0 LE
[Tue Dec  9 00:12:50 2025] Bluetooth: hci0: BCM20702A1 (001.002.014) build 1449

Once I completed these steps, I was able to complete the rest of the setup via the graphical interface, which enabled the A90 Pro headphones to be fully functional and connect via Bluetooth.

If you are using a different Linux distribution, your GUI will look different, but the general setup steps will be the same or similar.

There is a high probability that this setup would work with more wireless earbuds brands.