Pipewire and volumeicon startup proposed solution for antiX 23

[Member greyowl]

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Brian, thank you for your thoughts.

Dell Latitude D620 laptop with antiX 22 (64 bit)

[Member stevesr0]

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Brian,

Wowza!

stevesr0

(Sorry for your current stressors. My wife is recovering from surgery and it colors our lives.)

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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@greyowl and @stevesr0 thanks for your encouragement, personally and technically.

Steve, best wishes for you and your wife and her recovery.

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Brian Masinick

[Member Karo]

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Brian, so true. Magnificent!

Since english is not my native language and my knowledge is too poor to represent complex things I use a translator.
These are known not to be perfect. If you translate one of my posts from german to english into other languages, the result will be worse and worse. Therefore, I post in both english and german, so that non english speaking users can have the german text translated directly into their language.

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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Karo wrote:

Brian, so true. Magnificent!

Thanks!

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Brian Masinick

[Member olsztyn]

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Brian Masinick wrote:

siduction is the best example I can think of. It’s a VERY good distribution. It’s written by some talented people, a few of them are as volatile, maybe even more so than Torvalds himself has been accused of, but you can’t argue much about the quality of their work; it’s excellent – AND it has that systemd stuff all over it.

Out of curiosity, I am just playing with Siduction and I noticed that sound is based on Pipewire by default. Volume icon is there and all necessary pipewire components running.
Other (off volumeicon topic) obserations:
– DE is LXQT. Not too bad.
– Initial memory footprint (Live) is 460M on my test laptop X61. For comparison my antiX live on the same machine has 148M footprint. Granted, my antiX Live is highly tuned for best memory management and Pipewire. Siduction seems to have lots of components running by default, needed or not.
– Other desktops offered for Siduction are XFCE and Plasma. Full bloat.
– Other difference that helps growing memory footprint: Kernel is 6.5.
– At first glance I like my antiX desktop cleaner and nicer. Granted it is antiX/OpenboxLXpanel vs. LXQT of Siduction. To be more even handed I should compare antiX/IceWM instead. In such case Siduction desktop seems to be winning on aesthetics subjectivity.

I am curious of antiX SID/trixie vs. Siduction comparison. Will try this next…
Thanks for bringing up Siduction as on top of your list for intelligent development… It seems to make sense.

Live antiX Boot Options (Previously posted by Xecure):
http://antixlinuxfan.miraheze.org/wiki/Table_of_antiX_Boot_Parameters

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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siduction and the other non antiX distributions use 2-4 times as many resources as antiX, but they do have cutting edge software and full featured desktop environments. You CAN get a slightly closer comparison if you install IceWM and then boot from it. The resource usage will still be greater, but it won’t be four times greater, it may be 30-50% greater at the most with comparable login environments and similar software.

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Brian Masinick

[Member olsztyn]

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Brian Masinick wrote:

You CAN get a slightly closer comparison if you install IceWM and then boot from it. The resource usage will still be greater, but it won’t be four times greater, it may be 30-50% greater at the most with comparable login environments and similar software.

Good suggestion. I think I will try. I am sure you are right on resource usage. I would have to go for some better WM though in such case, so the difference may not be that huge after all.

Live antiX Boot Options (Previously posted by Xecure):
http://antixlinuxfan.miraheze.org/wiki/Table_of_antiX_Boot_Parameters

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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As long as whatever environment you choose is similar, you can get a fair comparison, whether it’s a window manager or desktop environment.

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Brian Masinick

[Member PPC]

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Just an update on pipewire and volumeicon on antiX 23 – this weekend, I finally installed antiX 23 64 bits, Sysv Full in my netbook.
Considerations:
– Previously, the unupdated pen-drive that I used to boot live always failed to provide volumeicon, sometimes, I think it failed to correctly provide audio at all. That was solved, even before applying abc-nix’s fix, by waiting for some seconds and restarting icewm. applying the fix, logging out and logging back on, resulted in audio + volumeicon always working perfectly (with one exception in some dozen times, if memory serves me right)
– Booting Live, the unupdated pen-drive failed, of course, to provide audio and volumeicon on this extremely slow device. I installed, knowing that the new pipewire configuration would automatically be setup. At first boot after installation, no volumeicon. I checked and pavu just found “dummy output”. Rebooted, pavu worked correctly, but no volumeicon. Sound worked perfectly, and I could use pavu to manage audio output. I can manually launch volumeicon and it starts and works also perfectly. So, I added “sleep 5 && volumeicon” to icewm’s startup file and rebooted. Audio works perfectly (has always done so, after that first reboot, for some half dozen times) but volumeicon does not autostart. I don’t really need it, and I know how to launch it manually, so it’s no big deal for me. If I feel up to it, I’ll try adding a bit more delay before starting volumeicon via icewm’s startup file.

PS: This netbook’s hard drive is so slow that antiX runs noticeably faster from the pen-drive, this probably explains why volumeicon does not have enough time to start after the delay… but not why it fails to start when I restart icewm, right?

P.

• This reply was modified 1 month, 2 weeks ago by PPC.

[Member abc-nix]

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I found this video on youtube. Someone else with pipewire problems. They ended up disabling pipewire.
Antix Linux Fix High Cpu

It would have been great if they knew how to troubleshoot or at least ordered the processes on HTOP from higher to lower CPU use. Probably many wireplumber instances running.

What is interesting with this video is that we can see what normal non-techie users experience. Do you guys think changing the toggle-pipewire script to replace the startup command to the one suggested here would help?

[Member PPC]

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abc-nix wrote:

Do you guys think changing the toggle-pipewire script to replace the startup command to the one suggested here would help?

I’ve been wanting to change that script forever… I’ll have to check out the video first, but I require the necessary steps to completely disable (i.e. uninstall? pipewire). Re-enabling pipewire is easy, even if we have to reinstall it- the fix should be automatically applied. The only problem I can envision is the necessity of adding a larger delay before starting volumeicon (either on the desktop-session startup file or in the window manager startup file).

P.

[Member abc-nix]

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PPC wrote:

I require the necessary steps to completely disable (i.e. uninstall? pipewire).

I think undoing what pipewire-alsa does or uninstalling it and restarting alsactl should be enough to have alsa work again without the need to reboot the system. The only issue is that the script will now require sudo access.

I will experiment tonight when I have some time.

[Member abc-nix]

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I still need to perform more tests, but so far I am able to “disable” pipewire on a live system without rebooting by:

1. Killing all wire processes
pkill wire
2. Removing pipewire related files from /etc/alsa/conf.d/
sudo rm /etc/alsa/conf.d/50-pipewire.conf /etc/alsa/conf.d/99-pipewire-default.conf
3. Restarting alsa
sudo alsactl -f nrestore
4. Restarting volumeicon
pkill volumeicon && volumeicon &

After doing this, normal ALSA worked as if pipewire was not there. It is easy to test as alsamixer will show the default Alsa controls (though I need to test with more applications).

My persistence file got corrupted, so I will create a new live-USB tomorrow and test if the changes are kept after rebooting. Re-enabling pipewire should be as easy as relinking the pipewire files to /etc/alsa/conf.d/ (from /usr/share/alsa/conf.d), restarting ALSA and starting the pipewire process (and restarting volumeicon). I will look into the toggle_pipewire script tomorrow.

[Member PPC]

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@abc-nix – I have a prototype of the new toggle_pipewire script that includes your code and also @anti-apXos code available over at https://www.antixforum.com/forums/topic/disabling-pipewire-in-antix-23/page/3/#post-120637

P.

• This reply was modified 1 month, 2 weeks ago by PPC.

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