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Compiler

Member

Registered: Yesterday

Posts: 2  

Excalibur, KDE, sound and screensharing

I recently migrated from KUbuntu to Devuan Excalibur + KDE.

The first thing I noticed after installing was that I had no sound (the Sound widged reported "Connection to the sound service lost").

Pipewire was installed but not started and pulseaudio was not installed.

A simple apt install pulseaudio fixed my sound, the sound widget was reporting again my microphone, soundcard, etc and everything was fine.

I was happy for a week with everything working smoothly until today, when I had to share my screen in the MSTeams PWA (under chromium).

The first error I got trying to share my screen was: "Failed to start screencasting. Failed to connect PipeWire context".

So, I assumed that KDE 6 + wayland requires to use PopeWire. I did then:

# apt install pipewire pipewire-audio wireplumber qml6-module-org-kde-pipewire pipewire-pulse pipewire-module-xrdp

This removed pulseaudio and installed pipewire.

I rebooted and then I had no sound at all again.

Doing some research, I found out that pipewire was started by systemd in other distros and I need to start it manually in Devuan. So I used this shell script provided in another thread. For some reason it does not work when added to KDE Autostart but it works when launched manually.

After launching the script manually, I got the sound back in KDE. The sound widget again reported the microphone and sound card outputs and I had sound everywhere.

Then I tried to share my screen again. Now I don't get anymore the "Failed to start screencasting".

I get 2 popups in the Teams App:

1.- "Your video isn't working. We couldn't access your camera"
2.- "There's an issue with content sharing"

If I launch manually /usr/bin/pw-v4l2, and I try to share again, then the first popup disappears, but I still cannot share my screen.

Maybe I'm missing a "service" to launch from the start script?

So... I'm begging for some help to finish my Devuan setup:

1.- How to get screen sharing working again (it worked perfectly on KUbuntu).
2.- How to get the pipewire services properly started at boot with sysvinit.

Thanks for any help.

PS (some additional info):

- I tried to login KDE with X11 instead of Wayland, and I got the same results, and also my personal KDE's global shortcuts and Window Rules were being completely ignored...

- I enabled chrome://flags/#enable-webrtc-pipewire-camera in Chromium.

- There's no chrome://flags/#enable-webrtc-pipewire-capturer in Chromium as some tutorials state. it might be related to chromium.

- I tried also running xdg-desktop-portal-wlr as explained here.

- I have this in my bash profile:

if [ $XDG_SESSION_TYPE == "wayland" ]; then
    export MOZ_DBUS_REMOTE=1
    export MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1
fi

- I found This Mozilla test page for webrtc that works for both Screen Capture and Tab Capture in Firefox-ESR and Chromium, so... might this be a MSTeams problem????

Last edited by Compiler (Yesterday 14:25:27)

Compiler

Member

Registered: Yesterday

Posts: 2  

Re: Excalibur, KDE, sound and screensharing

By the way ("semi-offtopic") I found out how to start pipewire when my user logs in:

• Place the script somewhere in your home folder, in my case ~/bin/autostart_pipewire.sh.

• chmod +x ~/bin/autostart_pipewire.sh

• Menu > search for "Autostart".

• + Add New, Application (not Login script).

• click on the Open File Dialog icon next to the input box.

• select ~/bin/autostart_pipewire.sh.

There is also an alternative using a .desktop file here.

• do not check "Terminal Options > Run in terminal".

• reboot.

Now the pipewire "init" script is launched when the user logins in KDE.

This still not solves the screen casting problem in Microsoft Teams but at least I don't have to start pipewire manually.

There's an alternative using a .desktop file and the same start script here.

Last edited by Compiler (Yesterday 18:02:16)