I recently purchased a small bluetooth usb adapter and I pulled out a small bluetooth speaker for use and testing. I am having some trouble connecting to the speaker and making it play the sound on my laptop. here is what I did.

I went to the blueman applet and clicked the option "setup new device". selected the speaker on it's search window and went forward. used a random passkey, waited for it to pair and selected "headset service" bullet and then clicked forward. The speaker gave an indicator tone to tell that the bluetooth adapter had successfully connected to it. But I am having trouble making it play sound.

To try to make it play sound I went into the pavucontrol interface and clicked on the configuration tab, I couldn't find the bluetooth device on the list and I went into the blueman device manager, right-clicked on the speaker, set it to trust the speaker (still no sound out of the speaker or option to make it show up in the alsa interface), I right clicked on it again and selected a couple of options, First was the A2DP audio stream (error), and the input service (still error), and headset service (still nothing but it connected to it successfully). What is my problem and how do I get it to play sound.

Is it listed by the command "aplay -l"? If so, you can specify the device with $HOME/.asoundrc

Debian (and most of its derivatives) has always had a problem with specifying sound devices, in my experience, unless you get pavucontrol, and even that has failed you. If the Debian wiki doesn't help, try the Arch one or look at this
http://linuxcommando.blogspot.co.uk/...bluetooth.html

No, it just has the two sound outputs I have for my laptop (the HDMI port output and the soundcard itself).

I had the exact same problem. In my case with Arch and pulseaudio my bluetooth devices weren't being recognized as usable audio devices by pulse about 75% of the time, even though bluetooth said they were connected. This was happening in both Gnome & KDE. In the end I solved this by giving up the gui for bluetooth and directly manipulating bluez from the command line. Now it detects and works every time without fail.

I can't figure for the life of me why this works. I don't know for sure but I would guess the gui options just manipulate the bluez utility themselves. Something is lost in translation I think.

The link post above tells you how to make device recognized as audio device.