No audio in Iron browser (others are fine) - SOLVED

[mow9902]

Hi All, and thanks for the hard work on F96.
I've been playing with F96-2 to determine whether or not I should move from fossapup64(F95).
I have very old HW (DELL Latitude E6420) but it has been performing really nicely with F95, so I won't to make sure everything works just as well on F96 before I move.

Current setup: fossapup64 USB frugal install with save folder.

I realize that F96 has moved to Pulseaudio for sound control and I've been trying to determine what difference that will make for my setup.
For various reasons I use a number of different media players and browsers, and I'd really like each of them to be able to play video and sound in F96 just as they do in F95.
I did some testing of a sample of applications and mapped the outcome.

You will see that my biggest problem is with the Iron Browser. Each of the other browsers can play 'most' of the audio/video clips, but Iron cannot play audio for any of them.

I don't have the technical knowledge to troubleshoot this, but I suspect that pulseaudio is involved somehow.
I have tried using pasuspender to temporarily halt pulseaudio while Iron is running - same result.
I have tried starting iron uwing apulse (as I used to do with firefox) - same result.

After boot, I do notice a pulseaudio error message in /var/log/messages.
If I start iron in a terminal seesion I also notice a pulseaudio error message.

I hope this information might be able to spark some ideas in more technical minds. Thanks in anticipation of any suggestions.

[thinkpadfreak]

Hello.

I don't use Iron, but I got interested, because, as far as I know, Chrome and Brave work fine on F96-CE.

I downloaded iron64.deb, unpacked it and made the contents into an sfs.
I was able to run Iron with the following command:

Code: Select all

# run-as-spot /usr/share/iron/chrome --disk-cache-dir=/tmp

I was able to play a YouTube video with sound. The sound is being played through pulseaudio.

Edit:
I suggest that you try this:
viewtopic.php?p=83312#p83312
Rebooting is necessary for the change to take effect.

[mow9902]

@thinkpadfreak Thanks heaps. You're a champion! The 5 second delay was not the problem for me - it was the 'run-as-spot' command. In F95 I had simply been running with 'exec' chromium and the --no-sandbox flag. This was the same way I was trying to do it in F96.
BUT - if I simply use 'run-as-spot' (and therefore no need for the --no-sandbox flag) sound works as it should!

Thanks again.

[cthisbear]

" Clarity"
I am going to assume you have made your Ventoy and are housing all of the forum distros in a
folder on your USB named 'BOOTISOS'.

(Those instruction have been posted numerously on the forum for Ventoy users.) "

I never knew that....Chris.

::::::::::::::

Thanks mikeslr and others..I will take a look.

Cheers....Chris

[mikeslr]

Thanks, Thinkpadfreak for your above post about Iron; and thanks mow9902 for confirming that running iron as spot solved the sound issue. Wonder if that change will also work with slimjet whose last version MikeWalsh structured to run with 'no-sandbox'?

Having multiple Puppys which now use pulse-audio, I also prefer portables over SFSes. I'll see if I can build Iron as a portable running as spot.

FWIW, I prefer running web-browsers as Root --getting files out of /spot/downloads is a PITA-- and was successful in restructuring Brave to do so, with sound. So it seems different web-browsers may now have different limitations.

[mikewalsh]

@mow9902 / @mikeslr :-

Strange. Can't work this one out, y'know?

I'm posting from Iron-portable, ATM, in Fossa 9.5, halfway through watching an episode of Star Trek DS9 on NetFlix. This is running-as-root, and audio is fine...

Mind you, on second thoughts, this is occurring in the newest Woof-CE Puppies, isn't it? The ones that all now have PulseAudio installed as standard, yes? See, I'm not running any of these; the one PA-equipped one I use at all is KLV 'Airedale', and the issue doesn't seem to occur there.

I'm wondering if it might be an idea for me to add a script to these portables which, at launch, asks the user if they want to run-as-root OR run-as-spot. Depending on the answer, it would then set up the appropriate environment & profile.

What do y'all think on this one? Overkill? Would it actually solve anything.....or would it just add extra complication to 'the mix'? Because you wouldn't know - until you tried running-as-root initially - if you were going to need to try running it the other way.....would you?

(In fact, you wouldn't need to have dual profiles, or owt like that.....just change permissions on the profile, lib directory and browser directory, depending on your selection. This wouldn't take so much doing; it could even be set so that you could choose how to run it every time you launch.....chowning items takes but a moment.)

Thoughts?

Mike.

[mikeslr]

Hi Mike,

Did you see my post here? https://www.forum.puppylinux.com/viewto ... 733#p84733

I haven't played with VanillaDpup recently, but the 'sound issue' only occurs with Iron and Slimjet run from Puppys employing Pulse-Audio. Brave and Google-Chrome worked AS-IS; and as I wrote, I could reconstruct your Brave-Portable to run as root with sound.

With Brave Pulse-Audio's Playback setting defaulted to LADSPA (which does not generate sound) but could be set to BUILTIN AUDIO which does. Iron (NoSandBox) didn't offer that choice. Run-as-spot it does.

PulseAudio-Gui Comparisons.png (134.2 KiB) Viewed 372 times

Some observation about running Iron-as-spot. The 'lib' folder and its contents were NOT required. I think it retained my re-configuration automatically. I don't recall having done anything.

The only thing I don't like about running as Spot are (a) getting files into & out of it. Your spot2root --sans permission changer as IIRC is no longer needed-- would be helpful. As far as I can tell web-cache is being directed to the external folder /PROFILE/spot/iron-browser/default/cache. An extension named History & Cache Cleaner -- Smart Clean does a good job of clearing it from time to time.

Figuring out how to re-structure slimjet proved 'above my paygrade'.

[mikewalsh]

Okay, guys.

I've done a small re-build of the Iron-portable package.

It still locates & runs exactly the same as before, but when you 'LAUNCH' it, you now see a small box which lets you choose to run either as 'root' OR as 'spot'. You get to choose how you want to run it for each and every session.

It now uses a permanent 'spot' directory, with the 'PROFILE' inside that.....but depending on your selection, permissions get chowned on the 'spot' directory, the 'lib' directory & the 'iron64' directory.......and for 'spot' selection, a wee blank text file is created inside the 'DATA' directory (this is removed at close if it exists).

The wrapper script - now re-named to 'RUN' - checks for the presence of this blank text file....which merely acts as a 'marker'. If it's present, Iron runs as 'spot'; if not, it fires up as 'root'. No doubt there's a more elegant way of doing this, but I have to work with what I know.....whatever my present 'skill-set' permits me. I've 'borrowed' this idea from the 'portable' build of the Tixati torrent client.

Do be aware that when running as 'spot', unless you reset the Downloads $PATH in the settings, it just goes straight into your 'spot' directory (NOT /spot/Downloads).

--------------------------------------------

The rebuilt package can be found at the usual link in the Iron-portable thread. The updater script functions as it always did; it's not affected by all the above malarkey!

Hope it helps some of you.

Mike.

[mikewalsh]

@mikeslr :-

Let me know if you want me to perform a re-jig on the SlimJet-portable, Mike. The same setup should work there, too. I can't think of any reason why it woudn't....

T'other Mike.