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emojifreak

Member

Registered: 2020-10-06

Posts: 15  

Playing YouTube on RPi4B with task-xfce-desktop

Dear Devuan ARM users,

As the upstream Bullseye almost frozen, I have seen if I can play YouTube video on my RPi4B 8GB with Devuan Chimaera. It was essentially a success with some tricks as follows:

• 5GHz WiFi becomes unusable with firmware-brcm80211 version 20210208-1 and newer, as reported Debian bug #985632. 2.4GHz WiFi works fine even with Bluetooth (resolved Debian bug #984844).

• task-gnome-xfce is installed.

• Pulseaudio does not work with ALSA sinks brought by vc4.ko, e.g. after logging into an Xfce session, in

  #!/bin/sh
  set -x
  while true; do
    pacmd stat
    pacmd list-sinks
    pacmd exit
    pulseaudio --start --log-target=syslog
  done

  every command gets stuck or fails (Debian bug #985928). A workaround is preventing pulseaudio from touching the ALSA sinks brought by vc4.ko. In /etc/pulse/default.pa

  • Comment out load-module module-udev-detect and load-module module-detect.

  • Add load-module module-alsa-card device_id=2 assuming snd_bcm2835 has device ID 2 in /proc/asound/cards.

• A YouTube video https://youtu.be/NCqNDjntd3E can be played by the Firefox ESR with unnoticeable drop of frames and unnoticeable degradation of textures. Audio is fine with HDMI output. Load average is around 4. 1.3 GB of memory is used by all the processes and 1.1 GB memory is used by buffer cache. So, 4GB model should be enough.

Devuan is booted from USB SSD, and installation was done by
https://github.com/emojifreak/debian-rp … builder.sh and
https://github.com/emojifreak/debian-rp … -devuan.sh.

I hope this being somewhat interesting to the Devuan ARM users.