No audio in standalone VMs but audio in preinstalled Qubes

User Support
1

The title says the problem but ill go into detail. I have audio in all Qubes that come with Qubes. I have no audio in standalone Qubes. The Vms are ubuntu as well…

Now the solutions I’ve tired and what I have gathered

  1. pulse audio is working correctly and the version is 10.0 (idk if that’s the most recent and I couldn’t find out how to update it in Qubes. (only fedora))

  2. I looked online again and found that I could symlink the pulseaudio file with pulseaudio10.0 BUT ln -s didn’t do the trick. (The command I tired was ln -s /usr/lib64/pulseaudio10.0 /usr/lib64/pulseaudio) To go into greater detail with this, I noticed that everything else pulse audio related is symlink already. The only thing that wasn’t was pulseaudio and pulseaudio10.0

2.5 I numbered this like this because I read on reddit that if the volume prefrences where grayed out this might be a solution. The only thing is everyone who was using this solution and said it worked was using ubuntu. Even one Youtuber was using 2 ubuntu machines and one was connected though a ssh tunnel and still had audio.

  1. I tired going on the Ubuntu VM and linking it but the only thing that VM is picking up is “dummy output”. Even tho I see the sound meter moving within the VM

  2. I tired looking at the config files and thought “maybe I could just make one” or “maybe I could just copy one and fiddle with it so it goes with ubuntu”. I would use the word configure but what I was doing was far from that concept… Also to make matters worse, I have been putting alot of “commands” in my terminal but been using pactl and pacmd so I hope that didn’t brake anything

  3. I looked on the forum and I saw something about installing pulseaudio-qubes-tools on my ubuntu VM but I can’t see where to install it from or even a clear post about them(I hope im not being dumb and the download is on the website because I’ve look)

I like running into problems like these beacuse you learn alot from trying to find the answer but this is ridicules!

2

Indeed (5) is your problem.
You may be able to use qubes packages in standalones: if created by
installing from iso there are known issues with Ubuntu HVMs.
I provide pre-built Ubuntu templates at https://qubes.3isec.org, and
also repositories of Ubuntu packages.

You could try installing the pulseaudio-qubes-tools packages in to your
standalone - I would strongly suggest cloning it before you do this
in case anything goes badly wrong.

1 Like
3

alright ima try them out I already have split GPG set up so that’s a plus too. Another 2 questions Is can I download those packages to my already made Ubuntu VM and where do I download the pulse audio tools (unless its in one of those repos you built).

Also do those arch templates come with a GUI for the desktop. Ive ran into arch before and there wasn’t any GUI the whole desktop and everything was cmd.

4

Yes, you can add those repos, as detailed at https://qubes.3isec.org,
and install packages as normal.

As Arch is integrated with Qubes, you run GUI applications as normal
from the menu. Each window will open on the Qubes desktop.
If you want “an Arch desktop” then you will want an HVM. (The same
applies to any other distribution or OS.) Almost certainly this is not
what you want.