Firefox 52, PulseAudio, and Lubuntu 16.04 LTS

[vasa1]

Firefox 52 on Linux needs PulseAudio to play audio. The release notes don't make mention of this. I think Lubuntu is the only official flavor that does not include PulseAudio by default.

Edit: by official flavors, I mean complete flavors here, not minimal installs or server installs

Edit 2: changed the title of the thread to include the supported version of Lubuntu which is affected.

[asgard2]

Pulseaudio is installed, but audio isn't working on ff 52.

 dpkg -l | grep pulsea
ii  gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio:amd64        0.10.31-3+nmu4ubuntu2.16.04.2              amd64        GStreamer plugin for PulseAudio
ii  pulseaudio                            1:8.0-0ubuntu3.2                           amd64        PulseAudio sound server
ii  pulseaudio-module-x11                 1:8.0-0ubuntu3.2                           amd64        X11 module for PulseAudio sound server
ii  pulseaudio-utils                      1:8.0-0ubuntu3.2                           amd64        Command line tools for the PulseAudio sound server

[vasa1]

I have

dpkg -l | grep pulsea
ii  pulseaudio                                  1:8.0-0ubuntu3.2                           amd64        PulseAudio sound server
ii  pulseaudio-module-x11                       1:8.0-0ubuntu3.2                           amd64        X11 module for PulseAudio sound server
ii  pulseaudio-utils                            1:8.0-0ubuntu3.2                           amd64        Command line tools for the PulseAudio sound server

I installed PA after upgrading to Fx52 and finding no audio via Fx on Lubuntu 16.04. That fixed it for me.

Start-Date: 2017-03-07  21:22:54
Commandline: apt-get install pulseaudio
Requested-By: vasa1 (1000)
Install: libpulsedsp:amd64 (1:8.0-0ubuntu3.2, automatic), pulseaudio:amd64 (1:8.0-0ubuntu3.2), rtkit:amd64 (0.11-4, automatic), libwebrtc-audio-processing-0:amd64 (0.1-3ubuntu1~gcc5.1, automatic), pulseaudio-module-x11:amd64 (1:8.0-0ubuntu3.2, automatic), pulseaudio-utils:amd64 (1:8.0-0ubuntu3.2, automatic), libfftw3-single3:amd64 (3.3.4-2ubuntu1, automatic)
End-Date: 2017-03-07  21:23:27

Let's hope someone who knows more about audio comes along.

Meanwhile, if you don't mind, please provide some detail about your OS. Is it Lubuntu?

[asgard2]

It is lubuntu 16.04 64Bit.
@youtube, firefox gives me a message at the top, that I may need to install "PulseAudio", it is not detected.

$ ps aux | grep pulseaudio
asgard2 1747 0.0 0.3 420160 11276 ? S<l 10:29 0:00 /usr/bin/pulseaudio --start --log-target=syslog
asgard2 4408 0.0 0.0 15796 988 pts/2 S+ 13:04 0:00 grep --color=auto pulseaudio

Maybe this is the problem:

$ sudo service pulseaudio restart
Failed to restart pulseaudio.service: Unit pulseaudio.service not found.

[vasa1]

It is lubuntu 16.04 64Bit.
@youtube, firefox gives me a message at the top, that I may need to install "PulseAudio", it is not detected.
...

Yes, I saw that as well and, after installing pulseaudio, I didn't have to run

sudo service pulseaudio restart

I just restarted Firefox and could get audio on YouTube.

Let's see what other Lubuntu users experience.

[Ahunt]

You can note that there is a year old Firefox bug on this marked closed:

* Firefox Bug 1247056

and two brand new bugs:

* Firefox Bug 1345661
* Firefox Bug 1345439

[vasa1]

You can note that there is a year old Firefox bug on this marked closed:

* Firefox Bug 1247056

and two brand new bugs:

* Firefox Bug 1345661
* Firefox Bug 1345439

Bug 1345439 is about the wrong url being linked to in the pop-up.

The direction Firefox is heading, my guess is Bug 1345661 will soon be marked a WontFix.

[Ahunt]

Bug 1345439 is about the wrong url being linked to in the pop-up.

The direction Firefox is heading, my guess is Bug 1345661 will soon be marked a WontFix.

Since the original bug from a year ago was closed and they bashed ahead with dropping ALSA support over the objections made, I agree that it will likely be marked as "wontfix".

This leaves the Lubuntu devs with a dilemma, since the default browser now has no sound with the default audio instalation, ALSA. They may decide to provide pulseaudio as one way to fix this through the update process.

Other possible fixes the user can do is install pulse audio as you noted above, or use another browser. I am using Chromium 56 from the repos and it is working just fine.

One comment from the original Mozilla bug is worth quoting, as Thomas Wisniewski said:

I'm sure I'm not the only one would rather not suffer PulseAudio on their systems, given that Firefox would be the only software (including other browsers) that would have it as a hard requirement (and given that PulseAudio still does not run well on some of the systems where I use Firefox as my main browser).

[vasa1]

...
This leaves the Lubuntu devs with a dilemma, since the default browser now has no sound with the default audio instalation, ALSA. They may decide to provide pulseaudio as one way to fix this through the update process.
...

There's still no discussion of this issue as of March 10 2017 in the Lubuntu users mailing list or in the developers' mailing list. Maybe it's being discussed in some Facebook group. IDK.

As for ALSA and PulseAudio, such discussions turn warm quite fast so I hope this thread doesn't morph into one of those

[Ahunt]

If you do see anything on the dev mailing lists it would be great if you could post it here for the record!

I was going to file a bug on this for Lubuntu, but not sure what to file it against. Firefox would be obvious but it works fine on all flavours but Lubuntu. It isn't really appropriate to tag ALSA, since it works fine or PulseAudio, since it isn't the problem and isn't even installed. I am was hoping that the Lubuntu devs would be using the default browser on Lubuntu themselves and would quickly notice the issue. Perhaps they have but there isn't an obvious solution beyond installing PulseAudio.

I am keeping an eye on the updates to see if anything gets pushed out to fix this.

Don't worry I certainly won't get into a PulseAudio vs ALSA flame war. I don't have a horse in that race.