Hi all, the usb-vm is nice but sometimes a bit problematic.
I tried to clone the usb-vm in order to have a special vm for video conferences (zoom, chrome-browser) so the usb webcam and usb headset with usb audio should work, at least this was intended, but for magic reasons it did not work.
The idea was to shut down usb-vm and to start usb-telefonf vm whenever there was a teleconference to be done, but again qubes is meant to drill yourselves a hole into your knee.
What solution would you suggest?
The teleconf-vm can be disposable.
sys-usb has access to all the usb stuff like webcam and external usb connectors where people plug in their usb-headsets (do not have problems with fancy sound boards, just use standard usb sound profile -16bit 48ksamp/sec max) and external web cams etc.
So having proprietary conference software like zoom (at least deb available), M$ teams (no supported linux version anymore) etc one would like to have a (disposable) VM for this conference stuff that just NEEDS to work but has temporary data only (copy paste, moving transfered files to other qubes using file manager - nice).
My own solution is connecting to Zoom via Firefox ESR using a self-hosted datacentre VPN in a public AppVM, then attaching a USB webcam to it for the duration of the meeting. Afterwards, I physically disconnect the webcam.
Hi, do you know you can click on an icon on the top right corner that looks like an usb memory stick to pass an usb device to a qube? You will be able to pass a webcam and usb headset to the qube where your conferencing happens.
It works, I can share the webcam and the USB-headset to my VM. So the vm runnung debian 12 xfce was able to use a web conference in chromium browser. Here I could choose between qubes audio and the USB-Audio of the headset.
There were some stability issues after plugging and unpluging the usb headset which caused a black screen in the camera window but it somehow worked.
There was no working microphone in the conference on my side, but my partner on the other side also had audio problems so we used the phone for audio
So conferencing for example with big blue button should be tested in a VM using qubes.
I will share my experience soon.
You may need to make some tweaks in the qube audio, you can install the program pavucontrol in the qube and run it, it will provide a lot of information and settings.
For the M$ Teams App the best option is now to install the Linux version of the Edge browser and login to teams from there.
Not trying to hijack your thread, but wanted to mention the below in case you experienced any of the same issues.
You didn’t elaborate on what specific problems you have been having. For the record I have also been having issues specifically with my audio since upgrading to R4.2/fc40 but have just now installed fc41 and need to test it all again. I have to host Teams meetings quarterly for my nonprofit board meetings and when I find I don’t have any microphone audio I have to revert to a separate Linux laptop or phone to participate myself. My first Webcam actually lost kernel support for webcam microphone audio in fc39, so I bought a new one, but since then (fc40) audio seemed to get really finicky and I have just not figured out what exactly isn’t right. If I played with the controls by changing things and then changing them back, I could eventually get it to work, but when you are hosting on a schedule this is very problematic to test live. I have a board meeting next month so I really need to get this audio thing re-tested and resolved. Both Teams and Zoom microphone are affected so it’s not app related.
I tend do do Zoom and MS Teams meetings more often than I would like, and this is what I have right now, which I like how it works:
For the webcam, I use qubes-video-companion, which works quite well. I added a shortcut to my appVM that starts qubes-video-companion with the webcam argument, so I can start that easily from the GUI before the call (for Teams) or before starting Zoom.
For the audio, I ended up setting a sys-audio qube. This lets me use a Bluetooth headset. I still forget at times to attach the microphone to the corresponding VM, though.
Screensharing is hit-or-miss, since you can only share from the qube running the videoconference software, and qubes-video-companion cannot share two things at the same time.
Then, you just look for the kernel module and build it from source.
make oldconfig
make menuconfig
make modules
…
it is not too much work.
having gentoo is also an option as you can compile what you need.
if you have a trusted airgapped net you could also use distcc to help compiling the stuff.
but compiling everything is a lot of waste if your opinion on the libraries and dependencies do not differ a lot from the mainstream, as you then also could use a pre-compiled distro.
I would suggest compiling a module, and if the kernel does not like it to compile a new kernel also.
compare the .config of both kernels and look for differences so you find the kernel module missing with ease,
look for the source code of the kernels of your distribution as the kernels from kernel.org get patched by fedora, debian and the like.
