I’m using 4.3. My mic keeps turning on, which I want off for safety reasons.
By “it keeps turning on,” I mean I will turn it off and it turns on again. This seems to happen when I am interacting with the template manager.
This seems more like a bug than a hack, but who knows. It’s happened about 4 or 5 times since I installed 4.3
What turns on and off exactly? I don’t understand
So when I am doing stuff, there is an icon in the xfce panel. It’s an icon showing a microphone and speaker.
Sometimes I am doing stuff and the microphone icon changes and turns on. There’s a visual indication of this. And I haven’t typed anything or touched anything near that mic/speaker icon. There shouldn’t be a reason for the mic turning back on.
Then I will click on the microphone speaker combo and turn off the microphone, then it turns back on later. There’s a little slider thing.
I don’t know if this is an electrical problem in my system, or if this is a code problem, or if maybe someone has access to my system with a firmware backdoor. I’m really not sure. I just installed 4.3 in the past day, so it’s unlikely this is downloaded malware, since the only thing I’ve done was follow one guide to install a vpn. it wouldn’t surprise me if this is actually firmware level malware that wants to hear what i’m typing, although it could be a coding problem or just electrical damage in my system.
This has happened when I am using template manager, when I’ve been uninstalling and reinstalling templates, and when I typed sudo thunar in dom0 terminal. I don’t know why this is happening.
It just turned on again while I was typing this. I also checked the weekly iso with the public weekly key (although it was in the same directory). This was some Qubes repo in france for weekly builds or something?
It‘s the same over here while updating templates (R4.2.4).
The two icons on the top right of the below picture?
Does this happen only when using Template Manager and updating templates? Is it specific template?
Exactly! It’s the switches on the audio mixer. They’ll switch back to “enabled.” Here, it’s just the updater. Neither the Template Manager/Switcher nor the Qubes Manager do anything concerning the aforementioned behavior.
I don’t remember if it’s connected to updating a certain template. I’ll observe it next time. I expected it to be normal. It had been that way for quite a long time.
Do you use a sys-audio vm? I get a different icon, where only the muted Speaker is visible.
No. That actually appears to happen to users without sys-audio.
It is possible to configure Xfce’s PulseAudio Panel Plugin to show the microphone icon:
Right-click on speaker icon → Properties → General → Always display the recording indicator
I don’t have that! xfce4-pulseaudio-plugin ver. 0.4.4 on R4.2.4 (up to date, installed as 4.2.1)
Edit: I only have two check-boxes, “Enable keyboard shortcuts…” and “Show notifications when volume changes”. And no sys-audio either.
The plugin release notes says that the indicator should be available on 0.4.4:
It might not be exactly 100% like the screenshots on this page, but should be available somewhere:
https://docs.xfce.org/panel-plugins/xfce4-pulseaudio-plugin/start
I get a different Settings Menu… will investigate why.
Later EDIT: no idea why. Maybe some later fixes were backported to Fedora? Versions immediately after 0.4.4 seem to try various fixes for a “flickering mic icon” introduced in 0.4.4.
thanks for confirming it’s not a firmware hack, or at least not a firmware hack specific to me
I saw it happen when doing other things in dom0, like opening thunar with sudo thunar in dom0 xfce-terminal. It happens every time I use Qubes.
Is there a github issue for this, because this is some crazy ass shit?
Does anyone know why this is happening?
I do not think so. Feel free to open a new issue and reference this forum topic.
If it happened only during update, I would have guessed it to be because of pipewire service restart. This could be reproduced by restarting the service manually. But in your case, you experience it in other places (in thunar). So I am clueless. You may look at journalctl logs and see if the pipewire service is restarted at the time you experience this bug.
Today I had such a “moment”: Doing qubes backups before switching to fedora-42-templates. Before selecting the qubes to include into backup, right after selecting backup path, passwords etc. and hitting “next” mic and speakers came back on.
Tangential to the topic, as a safeguard you could add an @hourly cronjob to dom0 that mutes the mic. I do this for the speaker.
A one-liner (untested, taken from here):
pactl set-source-mute @DEFAULT_SOURCE@ 1
Was there any hint in journalctl about the pipewire service being restarted?
Nope. Only the usual PAM (pam_sss.so) messages/errors after starting the backup vm with the nfs mount of the backup server share as a target.