Is anyone having trouble with sound on 4.2?

User Support
1

I used to have sound in any qubes based on the default template (fedora39) in 4.2. Tor browser audio didnt work. I didn’t care.

Now I can’t get youtube or vimeo playing in a basic AppVM.

Dom0 Volume Control isn’t useful. It only shows playback output settings for “system sounds”, “sys-firewall” and “sys-usb”. Why?

I see talk about pipewire and pulseaudio and other nonconclusive threads.

I noticed the last update hade a lot of updates on pipewire. Is this a problem? If so where is the documentation? There isn’t any community guide I can see. I don’t want a sys-audio qube just a regular sound output like in 4.1.

This is a security issue. I have to then move to my non-qubes device and look for the same videos (they are instructions) → linking.

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2

What template is used for “sys-firewall” and “sys-usb”?
What template is used for your qubes that don’t have sound? fedora39 = fedora-39 or fedora-39-xfce?

You can try to switch the audio from pulseaudio to pipewire:

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3

That was my sloppiness, sorry. The template is fedora-39-xfce. The sys- qubes are disposables based on default-dvm based on fedora-39-xfce.

Will try pulseaudio and report back.

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4

Yep. I’m having trouble.

pulseaudio disappeared from dom0 after my last update. I found out that I’ve been switched to pipewire, so I made sure to enable and run the service. It’s running.

I then rebuilt my domUs to include pipewire and pipewire-qubes but not pipewire-pulse.

And no sound comes out of my speakers at all, in spite everything I know about being set up properly.

5

pipewire-pulse is necessary:

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Why? There is no pulseaudio in dom0 any more.

7

As per @marmarek comment in the linked Whonix topic:

There is a small problem with this change: pipewire-qubes only Recommends: pipewire-pulse, which technically is correct (one can have a system with just pipewire and no pulseaudio). But such system is not very useful in practice - most applications connect to pulseaudio (either real one, or pipewire-pulse). And since Whonix packages are installed with --no-install-recommends, pipewire-pulse isn’t installed in the end.

So, I’d recommend adding pipewire-pulse to the list in qubes-whonix-workstation-packages-recommended too.

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Well, it makes no sense but it seems to be the case. THANK YOU.

And, by the way, I was told to remove it in the other thread.

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So hang on - for those of us who haven’t done this before, how do we add a package to qubes-whonix-workstation-packages-recommended?

And haven’t you just said it has --no-install-recommends? Doesn’t that mean that its going to be ignored?

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I notice that I have sound in fedora-39-xfce qubes, now though. Update must have fixed it. Thanks!

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That was a recommendation to Whonix maintainer. Whonix installs packages with --no-install-recommends (e.g. sudo apt install pipewire-qubes --no-install-recommends) so it didn’t install the pipewire-pulse package when installing pipewire-qubes.
If you run this command:

sudo apt install pipewire-qubes

It’ll install pipewire-qubes and all the required and recommended packages, including pipewire-pulse.