PipeWire integration discussion?

[DeepDayze]

oh @DeepDayze one other thing. you cannot actually remove pulseaudio at the moment unless you also remove firefox...

Yes can confirm firefox would be removed in MX-21 but was able to purge pulse on my Sid box even with firefox installed, as MX-21's firefox was built to depend on pulse. So all I did on my MX-21 install was to simply mask the pulse service to keep it from starting and left the packages installed.

If somehow pipewire-pulse was added as another option for depends for the MX build of firefox and make pulse suggested maybe then pulse can be completely removed except the pipewire-pulse package.

hmm... they moved pulseaudio to a "suggests" in sid. @mmikeinsantarosa might be something to consider for our firefox packages...

I may be willing to test that firefox package if one's built that makes pulse a suggests in MX. That would be useful going forward for some future MX release as debian is moving towards pipewire.

Another idea came to mind is perhaps making an MX package for something like pipewire-scripts to set up pipewire and wireplumber for running on sysvinit that people can install to set up PW and WP for them.

[asqwerth]

I'm not interested in tinkering with pipewire, but recall reading a Void Linux (runit init) discussion thread that stated that PW isn't dependent on systemd or inits at all, and could be run with autostart entries.

Of course, MX might need some adjustment since we ship with 2 co-existing inits.

[dolphin_oracle]

Another idea came to mind is perhaps making an MX package for something like pipewire-scripts to set up pipewire and wireplumber for running on sysvinit that people can install to set up PW and WP for them.

pretty much what I'm doing, working with the debian-backports packages for now...

[mmikeinsantarosa]

hmm... they moved pulseaudio to a "suggests" in sid. @mmikeinsantarosa might be something to consider for our firefox packages...

I am trying to follow along and toss a dart at it.

D.O.'s configs will handle the pulse stuff for a pipewire-pulse install.
move "pulseaudio | apulse," to Suggests

and replace them with
pipewire-pulse
in Depends

so the section of interest in firefox's control file might look something like:

Code: Select all

Package: firefox
Architecture: i386 amd64
Depends: libgtk-3-0 (>= 3.4),
         libglib2.0-0 (>= 2.32.0),
         libpango1.0-0 (>= 1.30.0),
         pipewire-pulse (>= 0.3.58-2),
         libavcodec58 | libavcodec-extra58 |libavcodec57 | libavcodec-extra57 |libavcodec56 | libavcodec-extra56
Recommends:
Suggests: pulseaudio | apulse 
Provides: x-www-browser, www-browser
Breaks: iceweasel
Replaces: firefox-amd64, firefox-i686, iceweasel
Conflicts: firefox-amd64, firefox-i686, iceweasel

Is any of this close?

- mike

[dolphin_oracle]

hmm... they moved pulseaudio to a "suggests" in sid. @mmikeinsantarosa might be something to consider for our firefox packages...

Kinda got my hands full atm. I can take a look next week. The first sets will definitely need to go into test until it all gets sorted out. If anyone wants to jump on this ahead of me, feel free to do so.

What's palemoon doing?

- mike

There is no hurry. Should just be a minor adjustment to the control file some day.

[dolphin_oracle]

here is a test deb that tries to set up pipewire after its installed. it depends on the 0.3.58 or higher, so packages in debian-backports right now.

the pipewire-setup-mx deb also provides a pulseaudio virtual package, so the real pulseaudio can be removed without removing firefox.

pipewire-setup-mx_22.10.03_all.deb

edit **new deb, previous does not uninstall correctly

[Steve]

Ugh, apparently the current Wireplumber (0.4.11) is broken and doesn't request the system ALSA device properly, that's a pretty major bug, this seems like a big mess right now...

@AVLinux

I know this is a Mx discussion… but with Debian 11 and the wiki instructions everything that I have is working, with 3.19… and qjackctl to do any needful routing. did not try to up to the latest.
Kinda neat. I would recommend only using the debian11 non free iso and do the install after booting into the live environment if you wish to try it out. No issues with alsa,
Will work it harder later this week…see if it holds up steve

Update- no x-runs so far anyway. Tried recording audio and midi from midi guitar 2 vst in Reaper, always got a few x runs with just playing mg2’s presets. Midi guitar stayed in the middle of the cpu graph no spikes… Great hopes here for smooth sailing.

Update 2 …
Still no x runs some weird shuddering of the mg2 vst at the start sometimes…click on the window and it stops and does not happen again in that session. Reaper locked up when I tried to save last night…
Reaper asked if I wished to close the non-responding window and shut it down all my work was saved when I loaded reaper up again. The reaper shows less than 10% on the fox cpu meter. Later…

Update 3
3.58 upgrade
No shuddering vst
This is

Tried my Mx side
I see that a Mx setup package is available, will try that later

[Stevo]

The MX Firefox isn't built from source by us, unlike Debian Sid's version. Because of ever-increasing requirements for versions of rust and cargo build-depends that aren't available in Stable, we just put Mozilla's binary builds into a deb package, and they are built against CentOS's or whatever libpulse by Mozilla the last time I looked.

We added "apulse" as an alternative dependency if you didn't want pulse, so I'd just add pipewire-pulse as another alternative so our FF will still suit all comers.

[Steve]

@AVLinux

I know this is a Mx discussion… but with Debian 11 and the wiki instructions everything that I have is working, with 3.19… and qjackctl to do any needful routing. did not try to up to the latest.
Kinda neat. I would recommend only using the debian11 non free iso and do the install after booting into the live environment if you wish to try it out. No issues with alsa,
Will work it harder later this week…see if it holds up steve

Update- no x-runs so far anyway. Tried recording audio and midi from midi guitar 2 vst in Reaper, always got a few x runs with just playing mg2’s presets. Midi guitar stayed in the middle of the cpu graph no spikes… Great hopes here for smooth sailing.

Update 2 …
Still no x runs some weird shuddering of the mg2 vst at the start sometimes…click on the window and it stops and does not happen again in that session. Reaper locked up when I tried to save last night…
Reaper asked if I wished to close the non-responding window and shut it down all my work was saved when I loaded reaper up again. The reaper shows less than 10% on the fox cpu meter. Later…

Update 3
3.58 upgrade
No shuddering vst
This is

Tried my Mx side
I see that a Mx setup package is available, will try that later

Didn’t work very well…sticking with Debian for now. With pipewire.

[AVLinux]

here is a test deb that tries to set up pipewire after its installed. it depends on the 0.3.58 or higher, so packages in debian-backports right now.

the pipewire-setup-mx deb also provides a pulseaudio virtual package, so the real pulseaudio can be removed without removing firefox.

pipewire-setup-mx_22.10.03_all.deb

edit **new deb, previous does not uninstall correctly

Thanks so much D_O!, I know I opened the thread a couple of weeks ago and since then have been very busy offline, It was not my intention to have one person do all the heavy lifting or for the integration to be so immediate on this but I certainly appreciate all the replies and responses and although I have yet to test on a production system it would appear many of the kinks are already worked out so I am hoping to give this full intention on a rainy afternoon this week!

Are you recommending MX-21 users to remain with the Debian-backports PW packages instead of in-house MX stuff? or is this kind of 'proof of concept' at this point to be added to MX Repos in the future once the recipe is figured out completely?