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#51 Re: Off-topic » Thoughts on Pipewire » 2025-08-22 12:37:57

Resampling is not a problem, the problem is that it is enforced upon ALSA users

Again, it is not. Resampling is forced if you use dmix, because dmix can only mix streams at the same (fixed, when you configure the dmix pcm) sample rate. By default, that's 48kHz.
Resampling is also used if there is a 'plug' PCM involved and your input doesn't suit the next component in the chain (likely dmix if you are using any of the "default" devices), because automatically converting formats and sample rates is what the plug PCM does.

Use a 'hw:' PCM directly, and no software resampling will happen, at all. Regardless of what plugins you have installed or not.
If your hardware doesn't support what you're trying to play, it will simply fail.
This, by the way, is what audiophools everywhere have been doing for decades to get that magical "bit-perfect" output. It's a pain in the ass because you can only play one stream at a time and it will lock the output PCM, but that's not a problem for e.g. a dedicated LMS or MPD music player.

Unlike dmix, which always runs at the 48kHz common-denominator unless manually told otherwise, pipewire will intelligently try to find the highest sample rate that works for both the input stream and the output hardware, and set that up dynamically when you start playback. If it later needs to mix in something else, it'll upsample (which is lossless for any sane rate converter) the new stream to suit.

All that happens without the user needing to touch anything, or grub around in arcane and poorly documented ALSA configuration files. While it might not be a benefit to you, I'm pretty sure it's a win for people who just want the best audio they can reasonably expect, with the least hassle.
Bear in mind, the vast majority of normies these days have no idea what sample rate means beyond "bigger number better", get their music from youtube or $streaming_service, and play it back on some horrid little class-d bluetooth speaker. If pipewire makes that miserable experience even a fraction better by doing sane things with resampling by default, it's a service to music everywhere.

Pipewire is not perfect, and yes, it's a product of the "evil" freedesktop crowd... But it is a whole lot better than pulseaudio, and a whole lot less cumbersome to set up than a bunch of ALSA plugins.

Once, I did what you're doing. I wrote complicated asound .rc files, I pored over kernel sources and I hung out on mailing lists trying to make sense of the piss-poor ALSA documentation... Because the alternative was pulseaudio (or ESD, *shudder*), and pulseaudio sucks.
Now, we have a sound-server that sucks a whole lot less. It's still a sound server for better or worse, but there are good reasons every other modern OS uses one. If you don't want it, that's fine, you do you. But don't spread FUD about being "forced" to do things, the choice is yours same as it ever was.

#52 Re: Off-topic » Thoughts on Pipewire » 2025-08-22 11:37:45

why is it enforced upon Linux users

It isn't. Pipewire is only "enforced" if you need it's video handling capabilities to work around the intentional "but muh securitee" deficiencies in wayland.
Is it regularly used to excuse those deficiencies? Sure. But that doesn't make it "enforced" any more than any other software that provides functionality which would otherwise be missing.

Is sshd "enforced upon users" because X11 lacks native network encryption, or because rsh was deprecated in 1999?

#53 Re: Installation » [SOLVED] No audio on Excalibur through pipewire on KDE wayland » 2025-08-22 10:01:03

brocashelm wrote:
steve_v wrote:
brocashelm wrote:

I'm quoting your entire post.

You full-quoted a post? Do you realise what you've done?
lol

Yup, doing it again. Next, I'm sure, is the deprecation of text highlighting...

Those poor, poor bits and bytes that could've been used for more whining instead.

Aww, nesting only goes 3 deep, this board is no fun. *waits patiently for fun-police*

Maybe we have to say his name thrice or something?
...Or it's just nap time. tongue

#54 Re: Installation » [SOLVED] No audio on Excalibur through pipewire on KDE wayland » 2025-08-22 08:38:50

I'm quoting your entire post.

You full-quoted a post? Do you realise what you've done?
lol

#55 Re: Installation » [SOLVED] No audio on Excalibur through pipewire on KDE wayland » 2025-08-22 08:27:17

Wayland/pipewire does just work on other non-systemd distros. Not wanting to run systemd does tend to go well with avoiding modern software trends generally, but it's really not a package deal so-to-speak.
I'm running a bleeding-edge Gentoo openrc install, with X11 and pipewire. There's nothing mutually exclusive there, and mixing-and-matching your preferred components is a tradition as old as GNU/Linux itself. It's not even a particularly unusual combination as gentoo installs go.

If Devuan goes down the "reject anything new" path that certain voices seem to be pushing around here, all that is going to happen is a slow fade into irrelevance.

#56 Re: Installation » [SOLVED] No audio on Excalibur through pipewire on KDE wayland » 2025-08-22 08:17:00

pessimistic arguing

Wait, this isn't this go and ralph's pessimistic arguing club? I must have taken a wrong turn somewhere, I swear that's what thesign on the door said...

#57 Re: Installation » [SOLVED] No audio on Excalibur through pipewire on KDE wayland » 2025-08-22 08:00:25

mildly fun way to do something I can work on for myself, although even if I do, it wont be soon.

Yeah, figuring it out was kinda fun while it lasted. Now that OpenRC has user-services, I expect that's the way I'll go next time I feel like messing with it.

IMO, for all its other flaws, systemd user-units aren't inherently a bad idea. The trick is, as usual, implementing something comparable without falling into the same scope-creep tarpit.
Devuan is going to need a generic solution sooner or later, if they're willing to embrace OpenRC as a first-class (or even default) init system, it can just be leeched off Gentoo and the solution already in testing.
If they want to cling to sysvinit as the default, we need something else... Which will likely have to be a Devuan project or a colab with Slackware, since pretty much everyone else has moved on from pure sysv.

At the very least, shipping an interim launcher in shell (aka. nicking gentoo-pipewire-launcher) and packaging some simple xdg-autostart files that work with common DEs would go a long way to alleviating the "I installed the default KDE desktop and stuff doesn't work" pain. It's not exactly a lot of work either.

self contradictory statement

Yeah, and for what it's worth I'm not usually quite as confrontational as I have been lately... This pattern from the admin(s) has been going on a long while, and today I just had a gutsfull of it.
Sorry that it was your intro to this board and all that.

#58 Re: Installation » [SOLVED] No audio on Excalibur through pipewire on KDE wayland » 2025-08-22 05:37:55

discourse?

Oh, there's still discourse to be had is there? My mistake, I thought this thread had run it's course and was just golinux slinging personal insults and mumbling into their soup about uppity youths, love and "shimmering" (whatever that is supposed to mean) at this point.

What did you have in mind?

#59 Re: Other Issues » [SOLVED] Excalibur and fail2ban » 2025-08-22 04:39:16

Ahh, personal attacks. The last refuge of the incompetent. Bye go, I'm done arguing with you.

Nice one nuking the image BTW, did that land a little close to home?

#60 Re: Installation » [SOLVED] No audio on Excalibur through pipewire on KDE wayland » 2025-08-22 04:25:49

Cool, I'm sure all the things will just magically fix themselves, if only we could all have a nice kumbaya session and feel the "shimmering" energy. roll

Devuan is code, literally. When somebody installs an operating system, they're installing code, not love and happy thoughts. When they turn on a computer, it's electrons and code that make it do something useful, not spiritual feels.
You can wish it were otherwise all you like, but reality is what it is regardless.

You claim Devuan needs more developers... Who by job-definition develop code. Then (likely to justify your own lack of technical input) you claim that code doesn't actually matter and it's all about love.
Which is it?
If code doesn't matter, Devuan should do fine with no developers at all, right? We just hold hands, sing a song, and a working release appears out of thin-air.

#61 Re: Installation » [SOLVED] No audio on Excalibur through pipewire on KDE wayland » 2025-08-22 03:49:59

Ahh yes, the old "everything new is bad, we're all doomed, my generation knew better, damn kids get off my lawn, why don't we all just die" line. All very helpful and productive I'm sure.

how my "detractor" will deal with the latest technologies

More productively (but probably not diplomatically), if this thread is anything to go by.
If I count correctly, four five, if I'm being generous users have piped up with technical support for this technical question, and through their efforts the problem is now solved. You are not one of them, nor have you offered any relevant information or technical assistance. Same goes for zapper.

#62 Re: Other Issues » [SOLVED] Excalibur and fail2ban » 2025-08-22 03:27:17

maybe you are getting paid for your efforts.

You have worn out you welcome and good will here

I have posted the information required to solve the OPs problem, because nobody else was doing that. As a result, this thread is now [SOLVED].
What did you contribute here?

#63 Re: Off-topic » Thoughts on Pipewire » 2025-08-22 01:54:14

Resampling is necessary in many run-of-the-mill scenarios. If all you want is to play one stream, that can be done with no resampling. If you want the kind of automagic mixing of multiple inputs and outputs with hotplugged devices over bluetooth and dog knows what else that people tend to expect from a modern system... Some resampling will be happening somewhere.

This is one advantage of pipewire over pulseaudio or ALSA DMIX, it tries quite hard to match your stream to a samplerate your hardware supports, and to never downsample anything if it can be avoided.
Whether or not pipewire's spa resampler is suitable for the cases where it is needed... That's up to your (presumably bat-like) ears to decide.

In general though, unless your resampling algo is really bad (or you're using a SoundBlaster 16), your speakers and listening environment will be doing more to screw up reproduction than anything on the source end.

#64 Re: Installation » [SOLVED] No audio on Excalibur through pipewire on KDE wayland » 2025-08-22 01:29:27

greenjeans wrote:

Not me bro, i'm hanging in there, and I for one appreciate your input. I'm trying man...

You are, and *respect*.

golinux... I would hope you two can come to a place of understanding.

At this point, I doubt it. Maybe when I see go drop some technical solutions to a forum question or code fixes to a broken package, rather than just shouting at other people to do it.
Responding to every problem with "YOU go fix it then", and coming from a position of authority at that... It gets real old, real fast. It sure doesn't achieve anything, or motivate anyone.

The flow of info does seem a bit sparse here of late, but likely that's due to so many changes in this new version, folks have lives outside of Linux and need to make a living still, and a new version of Debian adds a lot more to the load.

The wayland/pipewire thing has been coming down the line for years, we've had plenty of time. Every other non-systemd distro has something in place so it at least *mostly* works, and documentation for issues end-users might encounter.  With Devuan we don't even have a hint of intent or direction, let alone a shipped solution.

#65 Re: Installation » [SOLVED] No audio on Excalibur through pipewire on KDE wayland » 2025-08-22 00:37:18

radiatedradio wrote:

heres the init script, don't just copy it in, change the user name. It works fine for me with KDE, probably would work with any other desktop.

That'll work, but it probably won't play nice with a multi-user/multi-seat system.

The killing processes part could be removed, I just went off of the one I found here.

Killing processes is a dirty hack to kill lingering pipewire processes after a user logs out - which will tie up the sound devices so that they will have no audio if they log in again. Dirty, because it doesn't solve the root problem of making sure pipewire terminates when the launching user logs out (of possibly multiple sessions etc.).

That's one of the things we need real user-services for, this kind of shell-hackery is all well-and-good for a single-user box, but unix/linux is and always has been multi-user. Getting that to work properly means tying the pipewire daemons to the login seat lifecycle somehow, or hacking pipewire to run as a system-wide service (which it absolutely wasn't designed for).

zapper wrote:

As for you going elsewhere, only gotta say, later then, if ever.

I already am "elsewhere". I have exactly one headless box still running Devuan, and if the next upgrade is as much of a disaster as I expect it will be, that one will move to Gentoo as well.

As for being pissed... I'm being told to "go code" by a self-important bureaucrat who can't code, and directed to dead channels to engage with absent devs in non-existent onboarding processes.
And they wonder why anyone who might contribute gives up and goes elsewhere. That airfare to amsterdam go is so proud of? That could have paid someone to start sorting out this mess.

Case in point, let's recap 24 hours of the devuan-dev channel:

Xenguy: LeePen, I can't seem to get any response except crickets around here...
Xenguy: So, you push the keyring.html Live when you want, if and when you want, please.  I'm done with it.
Xenguy: .oO( Like herding cats ... )
golinux: Just updated the pad regarding some upcoming changes. Please have a look and comment before end of day Tuesday

Let's see... No development, one guy giving up because there's nobody around, and golinux dropping some bureaucratic chaff nobody cares about.
And this is right on a major release window. Trixie just dropped, where is everyone?

Why bother? Even the most stalwart rats must be making for the mooring lines by now, with all possible haste. Might as well join them, no?

#66 Re: Other Issues » [SOLVED] Excalibur and fail2ban » 2025-08-21 23:55:23

ralph.ronnquist wrote:

It looks like there you have a task to volunteer for.

You mean giving the forum autoresponder gramophone a whack, because it's stuck again?

zapper wrote:

licensing problem?

There is no "licencing problem". Some APIs were deprecated or moved to external packages, that is all.

zapper wrote:

Asking...

But apparently not reading, because g4sra already explained that.

As usual, a bunch of whinging and finger pointing about "them", "forced" changes, "clusterfuck" upstreams, and a bit of misdirection regarding "awful licence changes"...
While the real problem is right in our back yard, and has nothing to do with any of the favourite punching-bags. Nothing ever changes around here, does it?

#67 Re: Other Issues » [SOLVED] Excalibur and fail2ban » 2025-08-21 09:49:34

Someone needs to port fail2ban to the newer python version

Upstream fail2ban already has compatibility with python 3.13 (inc. bundling the async modules removed with python 3.12), said upstream version (1.1.0) is in trixie, and there appear to be no relevant reports on the Debian BTS...

If you're going to claim "well known and all over the internet", perhaps provide some examples?

Given that the only hits I can get for that exact error are 1: this thread, and 2: an artix user from 5 years ago, and there's no noise about this at all over on FDN, I'm far more inclined to think this has to do with python-systemd and Devuan packaging / shipped configs than anything else.

Ed. Yup, sure enough, again:

$ diff fail2ban_1.0.2-2_all/data/etc/fail2ban/paths-debian.conf fail2ban_1.1.0-8_all/data/etc/fail2ban/paths-debian.conf 
30a31,41
> 
> # In Debian, these services will log to the journal via syslog, so use the
> # journal by default.
> syslog_backend = systemd
> sshd_backend = systemd
> dropbear_backend = systemd
> proftpd_backend = systemd
> pureftpd_backend = systemd
> wuftpd_backend = systemd
> postfix_backend = systemd
> dovecot_backend = systemd

$ diff fail2ban_1.0.2-2_all/data/etc/fail2ban/jail.d/defaults-debian.conf fail2ban_1.1.0-8_all/data/etc/fail2ban/jail.d/defaults-debian.conf
0a1,4
> [DEFAULT]
> banaction = nftables
> banaction_allports = nftables[type=allports]
> 
1a6,7
> backend = systemd
> journalmatch = _SYSTEMD_UNIT=ssh.service + _COMM=sshd

That's not going to work, now is it? Nice job Devuan packaging team merging stuff from debian without testing it bot, great catch. Definitely fixing all the systemd things for this premiere systemd-free distro. roll

@OP, make sure all your jails are using the 'polling', 'pyinotify' (if you have that installed) or 'auto' backends. This might not be your problem, but I suspect it is based on where that error appears to be coming from...
Either way though: Blindingly obvious excalibur packaging fail. If it doesn't cause problems here, it will later.

#68 Re: Installation » [SOLVED] No audio on Excalibur through pipewire on KDE wayland » 2025-08-21 05:13:20

Perhaps that task has been waiting for YOU to suggest it, set it up and keep track of all its moving parts.

Keep repeating the same bullshit Go, maybe it will come true. Or just go back to your CSS and conferences.
The dev channel is utterly dead, forum questions get canned responses, nothing ever changes. I'm done here.
This right here is why you have no new devs. If you can't figure that out, you have my sympathy... But not my motivation or any of my time. I'll spend those on a distro where somebody gives a fuck.

different aspects of devuan's development

How many aspects can *crickets* and that one dude giving up because *crickets* have?

#69 Re: Installation » [SOLVED] No audio on Excalibur through pipewire on KDE wayland » 2025-08-21 02:44:50

So, IOW "There is no formal procedure to become a Devuan contributor."

Why do I even bother. Guess I'll go see if #devuan-dev is still a whole bunch of resounding silence.

zapper . . . do you ever have anything useful to say?

Good to know I'm not the only one who has noticed. roll

derailed

The answer(s) to the original question and comments on the situation in general have been covered ad-nauseam in another thread, what else is there to do?

#70 Re: Installation » [SOLVED] No audio on Excalibur through pipewire on KDE wayland » 2025-08-21 02:06:50

Sigh...

steve_v wrote:

Four months ago I asked:

What I would like to know is: Which way does Devuan intend to handle this, and is there anything that needs doing there? What solutions are being considered? I contributed one possibility way upthread, is it worth persevering with or is Devuan going to do something totally different?
Is anything at all happening, or are we just going to do the "wait for debian to make a move, then delay release for 3 months while we put out fires" thing again?

And I still don't have an answer.

Passive-agressive response still fails to answer question.

steve_v wrote:

mentorship program... documented pathway... active developers in the user IRC channel
Where is any of this stuff for Devuan?

Or other question for that matter.

Is it any wonder I said "fsck it then", and moved over to Gentoo? Why would I care? The horse is at the water, but it's not drinking.

Perhaps you might consider contributing

Perhaps, if it's less painfull than pulling proverbial teeth. Are you on the Recruiters Team? Where is the IRC channel to find a mentor and who should I ask? Are there tests I would need to take? Where do I find documentation on this process?
Does this project actually have an organised development process, or is it just a collection of random personal-project warts on Debian's backside?

You want contributors? Make it easy, make it organised. "Why don't YOU $whatever" is pointless if you don't also set out what, how, and who to contact.

#71 Re: Installation » [SOLVED] No audio on Excalibur through pipewire on KDE wayland » 2025-08-21 01:47:39

getting pissed

I've been pissed with this whole situation for some time, because nothing at all appears to be happening, and the standard tag-line around here when it comes to systemd-dependent packages is "just don't use them"... While the distro steadily looses functionality and the users steadily loose options.
Systemd is not going to go away, and burying our heads in the sand isn't going to fix anything.
User-units are a thing, and we need a solution. Define what that solution should look like and someone might just provide it.

EDX-0 dreamed up a whole user-init system, is Devuan interested? Is this the solution we should be contributing to? Who knows, there's nothing but silence from leadership.

Need more devs? Sure, every project needs more devs. You don't get more devs by bitching about it, you get them by training up more devs.
That means setting out what needs doing, how to go about doing it, and how to get it into the distro, then providing hands-on guidance and mentoring to make sure it doesn't break anything.

I have never written code and I couldn't write a bash script if my life depended on it

And yet, here you are shouting at others for not doing those things.

Dyne only provided airfare to the Amsterdam Conference to two people and I was one of them.

Yes yes, I'm sure you're very important. We were talking about "sanitizing" packages, were we not? What do airfares have to do with that?

#72 Re: Installation » [SOLVED] No audio on Excalibur through pipewire on KDE wayland » 2025-08-21 01:17:35

Ahh yes, Mr. Pot turns up to shout at Mr. Kettle, right on queue.

how many packages have YOU offered to "sanitize'

Right back at you^. I don't see any code or package contributions at all in your history on git.devuan.org...

in the trenches

... Twiddling with documentation, web-infra and theming. Not fixing broken packages or implementing solutions for systemd-dependent components.

Four months ago I asked:

What I would like to know is: Which way does Devuan intend to handle this, and is there anything that needs doing there? What solutions are being considered? I contributed one possibility way upthread, is it worth persevering with or is Devuan going to do something totally different?
Is anything at all happening, or are we just going to do the "wait for debian to make a move, then delay release for 3 months while we put out fires" thing again?

And I still don't have an answer. How do you expect "users to step up" when there is nothing but radio-silence from the supposed leadership?

To take Gentoo as an example: There's an established mentorship program and a well documented pathway to moving from "random packages in user overlay" to "peer-reviewed packages in guru" to "dev reviewed packages in official repo" to "dev comitting directly to official repo".
There's a whole set of documentation and guidelines on the subject, and right from the beginning there are active developers in the user IRC channel when we have random questions. Hell, asking there often gets official packages fixed in minutes.
Where is any of this stuff for Devuan?

#73 Re: Installation » [SOLVED] No audio on Excalibur through pipewire on KDE wayland » 2025-08-21 00:20:58

A solution I found, which i haven't tried yet, is that gentoo ships a pipewire launcher service file in their distro for openRC, which I'm using.

gentoo-pipewire-launcher is intended to be started per-user as part of session startup (e.g. xdg-autostart or xinitrc), not by openrc.
As I said above, pipewire is intended to be started by systemd user units for each user login, not system-wide by init as root. Current openrc releases do have (experimental) user-unit support which could handle this... But this is Devuan we're talking about here so good luck finding current anything in the repos.

To quote the Gentoo wiki page (which you should also read completely):

There is no truly standardized way (outside of systemd) to load PipeWire when starting a graphical shell, and users need to choose the correct approach based on how their graphical environment is started.

In all cases where systemd user services are not being used, PipeWire must be started before anything that might try to connect to any sound input or output, such as a volume monitoring applet.

Using the gentoo script is one option, others are discussed in the thread I linked earlier. How you actually launch any of those depends on your graphical session, for KDE on wayland, xdg-autostart is probably easiest.

FWIW, this was my suggestion, and is what I'm using right now on Gentoo (It works well enough I haven't gotten around to moving it over to openrc user-units). Make of it what you will, it does require backporting a not-ancient daemon version from unstable.

I also wouldn't have to deal with this if by default when I install KDE with the whole distro, I didn't get a broken sound server, and having to manually switch to pulse.

Indeed. While it is likely a dead horse, I'll flog it some more here: Devuan, as a supposed leader in systemd-free distros... Does precious little leading.
Where real work is needed to get things working without systemd, solutions are lifted from Gentoo (eudev, elogind, opentmpfiles etc.). Everything else is just banning packages rather than fixing them, or shipping broken setups like we see here with wayland and pipewire.
I have asked repeatedly what Devuan's direction and preferred solution for user-units is, and all I get is a bunch of "nothing, wait for Debian to fix it" wilful inaction.

#74 Re: Installation » [SOLVED] No audio on Excalibur through pipewire on KDE wayland » 2025-08-20 06:23:41

its supposed to be started with whatever init is chosen (bopenrc/sysvinit/runit/s6)

No, it (all 3 daemons, in the right order) is supposed to be started as systemd user-units, with dependency management and supervision. Most distros without systemd ship a variety of (usually shell) hacks to do the same, with varying degrees of reliability...
Devuan ships nothing, and just leaves the mess for the end-user to figure out.

I think that is what steve_v means.

It is not.

how I start alsa

You don't "start" alsa, alsa is kernel drivers and doesn't include any daemons to start. Do you actually have any idea what you are talking about?

I imagine it works similarly for pipewire

Imagination does nothing toward Devuan shipping a pipewire package that works out of the box, or solving the OP's problem.

All of this has been discussed thoroughly in the thread I linked above, why are you "imagining" instead of reading that?

#75 Re: Installation » [SOLVED] No audio on Excalibur through pipewire on KDE wayland » 2025-08-19 23:41:01

radiatedradio wrote:

running pipewire manually through my terminal

That's not how pipewire is meant to be started.

radiatedradio wrote:

sudo /usr/bin/pipewire

That's not even remotely how pipewire is meant to be started.

radiatedradio wrote:

What could be the issue?

Failure to read the documentation or search the forum.

greenjeans wrote:

do you have Pipewire installed

They do, but they're starting only one part of it, manually, and with sudo for maximum borkage (sudo is always the answer roll). It can't find it's runtime directory, because that env is not set for root (even if sudo propagated those vars, which it doesn't).
Even if it could, sound still won't work without wireplumber (and pipewire-pulse if you want the KDE mixer and stuff).

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