Connect Alexa Echo As External Speaker From Linux LXDE

Connect Alexa Echo As External Speaker From Linux LXDE

I have this old E5200 Petium Duo Core machine, installed with Raspberry Pi Desktop. This machine doesn't came with bluetooth, so I just bought a cheap bluetooth dongle (Essanger bluetooth 5.1), which I don't even know will work or not, luckily it works.

These are the simple steps to connect the Alexa Echo as an external speaker through bluetooth:

1. mobile > Alexa app > Devices > [x] Echo. Then you notice the LED of the speaker is blinking.
Note: Connect the bluetooth device (the Echo speaker) from the machine.

2. RPi Desktop > Bluetooth icon (LXDE panel)

3. After connected, right clock at the sound icon, select the specific speaker.

That's all.

Upgrade Raspberry Pi Desktop 2022 to Debian 12

Upgrade Raspberry Pi Desktop 2022 to Debian 12

Much older Rpi Desktop

The reason I want to upgrade the Raspberry Pi Desktop to Debian 12 Bookworm is just to try out the new Linux kernel 6. The older kernel 5, released in 2019, is about 3-4 years old.

The upgrade takes me around 4 hours on my (older) machine. After upgrading, a lot of the Raspberry Pi Desktop settings were changed, and seems slower at the first glance. My advice is not to upgrade until the official release is out for Raspberry Pi Desktop OS.

How to upgrade?

Change the APT source from Bullseye (version 11) to Bookworm (12). Bullseye and bookworm are the code name for the Debian OS version.

  
# edit /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list.d/raspi.list
eg. deb http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm main contrib non-free