USB-bluetooth drivers for Ubuntu 16.04

I need to add bluetooth to my desktop Ubuntu machine, running 16.04. Do I need to buy a specific USB-adapter for driver-support, or can I go pickup basically anything, and it should have support and work?

Solution 1:

A well-trod path for this is already on the Ubuntu wiki:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/HardwareSupportComponentsBluetoothUsbAdapters

The page is maintained by the community - if you discover updated or new information, please share.

Solution 2:

I've had a problem with getting Bluetooth audio (well any bluetooth connection) to work with Ubuntu 16:04 on my HP Envy 17 which runs a Broadcom Limited BCM4352 802.11ac Wireless Network Adapter [14e4:43b1] (rev 03).

After a lot of searching over the last two years, I had a clue in that there was a missing firmware driver error:

$ dmesg grep bluetooth

bluetooth hci0: Direct firmware load for brcm/BCM20702A1-0a5c-21fb.hcd failed with error -2

so it was just a matter of tracking down the missing piece of firmware and copying into /lib/firmware/brcm/ which I found at github:

https://github.com/winterheart/broadcom-bt-firmware

and now it works fine!