No sound on AntiX 19.3 Net

[Member Annorax]

Hello all,

I’m running AntiX 19.3 in VirtualBox on a Windows 10 host in order to play around with it and see how it behaves in hopes to install it on an old 32 bit computer I have. I have successfully installed the Net version with JWM, Firefox, xterm, and very little else as I’m trying a completely minimal setup.

For the most part everything works well, except sound. I am using Firefox with Youtube to test the sound and when I play a video, playback works but no sound, even as the root user. I’ve installed alsa-utils and ensured the volume is in the middle or so via alsamixer but nothing. My user is in the audio group.

Is there something else I am missing?

[Member Xecure]

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sudo apt install apulse
apulse firefox

firefox-esr (from the Debian repos) uses alsa. Other browsers (firefox, chrome, etc.) expect pulseaudio. apulse lets programs that expect pulseaudio play sound through ALSA.

• This reply was modified 2 years, 4 months ago by Xecure. Reason: Fixed incorrect packager

antiX Live system enthusiast.
General Live Boot Parameters for antiX.

[Member Annorax]

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Thank you for the info, I didn’t know that. I tried firefox-esr and that works, however regular Firefox with apulse throws this error. Any ideas?

[apulse] [error] do_connect_pcm: can’t get initial hw parameters for playback device “default”. Error code 1 (Operation not permitted)
[apulse] [error] do_connect_pcm: failed to open ALSA device. Apulse does no resampling or format conversion, leaving that task to ALSA plugins. Ensure that selected device is capable of playing a particular sample format at a particular rate. They have to be supported by either hardware directly, or by “plug” and “dmix” ALSA plugins which will perform required conversions on CPU.
[Child 4225, MediaDecoderStateMachine #1] WARNING: a055eca0 OpenCubeb() failed to init cubeb: file /builds/worker/checkouts/gecko/dom/media/AudioStream.cpp:334
[Child 4225, MediaDecoderStateMachine #1] WARNING: Decoder=a56b5a40 [OnMediaSinkAudioError]: file /builds/worker/checkouts/gecko/dom/media/MediaDecoderStateMachine.cpp:3892

[Member Xecure]

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Just installed it on my antiX 19.3 base system, and apulse firefox doesn’t spit any error here, so it is probably some special dependencies you are missing.
On my system, all alsa related packages I have installed:
alsa-tools
alsa-utils
alsamixer-equalizer-antix
apulse
gstreamer1.0-alsa (I think this one is not needed)
libsox-fmt-alsa (don’t know who’s dependency this belongs to)

You will have to experiment or follow the error messages on a google search to find the exact culprit.

antiX Live system enthusiast.
General Live Boot Parameters for antiX.

[Anonymous]

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Firefox-esr (compiled by MX/antix)

apt show firefox-esr | grep -e ‘Version’ -e ‘Maintainer’
^—> compiled and packaged by debian Mozilla Team
( probably Mike Hommey https://glandium.org/blog/?p=4020 who is also a Mozilla employee )

apt show firefox | grep -e ‘Version’ -e ‘Maintainer’
^—> mozillabinaries (compiled by Mozilla) placed into *.deb and served from MX Linux repository

[Member Xecure]

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Anonymous wrote:

apt show firefox-esr | grep -e ‘Version’ -e ‘Maintainer’
^—> compiled and packaged by debian Mozilla Team
( probably Mike Hommey https://glandium.org/blog/?p=4020 who is also a Mozilla employee )

Sorry. I stand corrected. Thanks, skidoo.

antiX Live system enthusiast.
General Live Boot Parameters for antiX.

[Anonymous]

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AntiX 19.3 in VirtualBox on a Windows 10 host

virtualbox-guest-utils v6.1.14 is preinstalled in antiX

“no sound” is among the symptoms attributable to mismatched versions of host/guest virtualbox components. You may need to purge the preinstalled guest additions and then install a different version to match that of the host system.

I tried firefox-esr and that works, however regular Firefox with apulse throws this error. Any ideas?

excerpt from a blog entry, found via websearch “firefox linux apulse” firefox-drops-alsa-apulse-to-the-rescue

Sandbox security settings

    security.sandbox.content.level should be lowered from 3 to 2 (edit: this step might be unnecessary with proper whitelist settings).
    security.sandbox.content.read_path_whitelist should be set to /dev/snd/,/home/username/.asoundrc
    security.sandbox.content.write_path_whitelist should be set to /dev/snd/ (the trailing slashes are important)
    security.sandbox.content.syscall_whitelist should be set to 16, which is the syscall number for ioctl (on x86-64, on 32bit x86 systems the ioctl number is 54).

Selecting the correct playback device

If we don’t want apulse to try and use the default alsa device for audio playback, we need to set the APULSE_PLAYBACK_DEVICE environment variable. This is particularly important because firefox tries to output floating point audio samples, and the dmix (software mixing) output which is probably the default, or even worse hw, doesn’t do format conversions. A list of currently available devices can be obtained by running aplay -L.

Initially I tried setting APULSE_PLAYBACK_DEVICE=plughw:0,0 which handles format conversions, but unfortunately then I lost the ability to mix the audio output of multiple processes, and whenever one firefox tab was playing sound or even holding the device open for some reason, nothing else in the system (not even another firefox tab) could. One way to fix this problem is to define another plug type output (in .asoundrc), which then feeds dmix instead of hw as is the case with plughw. Here’s what I used in my .asoundrc to achieve that:

pcm.plugdmix {
    type plug
    slave.pcm "dmix"
}

Then it’s only a matter of setting APULSE_PLAYBACK_DEVICE=plugdmix, and I have both format conversions and software mixing at the same time.

and another reference, here, again mentions adjusting the sandboxing prefs:
https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=257818

[Member Annorax]

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Thanks guys, there’s a lot of good information here. There must be something VirtualBox related as nothing I do gets sound working in regular Firefox. I thought installing in a VM would be easier to get a feel for it but it might have just been easier to go ahead and install on a real computer, lol. Instead of spending time with the VM I might just go ahead and do that!

[Member ModdIt]

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On a regular install no sound issues with latest Fox and alsa.
I do have to use an .asound.conf in my home. In my case content as below.
That points to the default hardware device.

#Substitute N with a small integer, 0 for your first sound card (which is the default),
#1 for your second, and so on.

pcm.!default {
type hw
card 0
}

ctl.!default {
type hw
card 0
}

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