Explanation / help needed for sound problems after in-place upgrade to 4.2

User Support
1

Context: I only found out this morning that audio is no longer working after the ~ in-place ~ upgrade to Qubes 4.2.1 on Sunday for my existing qubes.

Sound was working fine before in my ~ personalized ~ qubes based on ‘debian-12- / fedora-39-minimal’ templates in Qubes 4.1.2 !

I did some tests to gather a bit more info up front:

  1. Try to reproduce the problem in a dedicated qube using the ~ new / upgraded ~ ‘fedora-39’ template ?
  • Result: NO, sound is working fine in that qube !
  1. Try to reproduce the problem in a dedicated qube using the ~ new / upgraded ~ ‘debian-12’ template ?
  • Result: NO, sound is working fine in that qube as well !
  1. Try to reproduce the problem in a dedicated qube using the ~ new / upgraded ~ ‘whonix-workstation-17’ template ?
  • Result: YES, sound is NOT working in that qube !

I’d like to use this problem as an opportunity to learn more about Qubes OS in general & eventually also about dedicated GUI- & Audio qube(s).

Do you have any ideas / recommendations what to check next ?

With kind regards,

Viktor

2

Probably related:

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It looks like the scripts handling the in-place upgrade for VMs using ~ personalized minimal ~ templates are not - or - at least not fully, taking care of the move from ‘pulseaudio’ to ‘pipewire’ …

I was able to resolve the sound problem by creating a new ~ personlized minimal ~ template, where I changed the ‘pulseaudio-qubes’ package, which I used in the old template, to the now required ‘pipewire-qubes’ package.

Additional note: The documentation page on ‘Minimal templates’ [1] is still referencing the old ‘pulseaudio-qubes’ package !

I only found by comparing the package content of the newly downloaded ‘fedora-39’ template - and - the old / migrated minimal templates …

Please advice if any of this deserves creating an issue in GitHub.

[1] Minimal templates | Qubes OS

4

The in-place upgrade script should automatically switch from pulseaudio to pipewire. If it did not, something probably went wrong, or the step was skipped for some reason.
The documentation does need an update. It’s a community effort, so if you can create a pull request to add it, specifying that it’s just a 4.2 thing, then go ahead. Otherwise, you can just create an issue.

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@DVM : Thanks for your F/B ! - After I have migrated all my personalized qubes I’ll create a P/R for the documentation topic.