Arch Linux

matchadoabot

Member

Registered: 2017-02-28

Posts: 2

Audio in Display Manager and Chrome Remote Desktop Instance

I have been facing a number of audio issues with my first time install of Arch Linux. All I really want to do is have sound in the login/display manager output to HDMI (or some default device), in my local desktop after logging in through the display manager and have sound through the remote instances (via Chrome Remote Desktop) of my desktop. At the same time, I want the ability to use create a remote desktop instance from the login screen (preferably without logging in)

My current setup is the SDDM display manager, the Budgie Desktop Environment, an NVIDIA GPU with proprietary drivers. Chrome Remote Desktop opens an XFCE environment because Budgie is not compatible.

Here is what I have tried so far:

I have made my user linger in systemd using

loginctl enable-linger username

That allowed me to use Chrome Remote Desktop (installed from the AUR) even from the login screen. However, there was no audio. That being said, as instructed from the "crd --help" command, I uncommented all the default PulseAudio configurations on /etc/pulse/daemon.conf and /etc/pulse/client.conf. That worked and Chrome Remote Desktop could then forward audio to whichever device I was Chromoting from. However, by doing this, when I login locally from my desktop, no audio device is detected. I do feel like this is just a matter of tinkering with the PulseAudio settings, but I have had no success so far. I was thinking maybe I had to enable PulseAudio as a system-wide daemon or maybe I could not login to the same user twice (Chromoting and locally).

This leads me to my second, but probably related issue. Since I was using SDDM and customizing it, I decided to use one of those video background themes. While I did manage to make the backgrounds work, I am not hearing any audio from the videos I am playing. I initially thought it was an issue with PulseAudio running due to my lingering user that I enabled. When I disabled it though, it still didn't work. I tried playing around with alsa settings (asound.conf) and PulseAudio's defaults.pa, but so far I still cannot output HDMI audio in my display manager.

I know these are two different problems, but I think they are very much related. I've had a ton of fun installing and tweaking Arch Linux as a first time user, but these issues have proven to be quite difficult to solve. Any help would be appreciated.

HiImTye

Member

From: Halifax, NS, Canada

Registered: 2012-05-09

Posts: 1,072

Re: Audio in Display Manager and Chrome Remote Desktop Instance

I just wanted to say that I enjoy the fact that you put so much effort into solving it yourself. for that, I salute you

all of these things seem too complex for me to wrap my brain around right now. for remote desktop audio sharing with pulse, you need to enable network audio sharing in pulse's config. as far as I know, pulse should enable audio as soon as it's loaded, so if it isn't outputting, unless it's muted it should output audio no matter what screen you're on. HDMI output makes things more complicated, however, as you need to tell pulse which output you want to use explicitly, or create a dummy sink

edit: you might want to give this a try

Last edited by HiImTye (2017-02-28 06:40:01)

c00ter

Member

From: Alaskan in Washington State

Registered: 2014-08-28

Posts: 420

Re: Audio in Display Manager and Chrome Remote Desktop Instance

@OP, like @HilmTye I had a bit of difficulty understanding what you are doing (blood draw day--no coffee), but if the problem is the desire to output to two or more devices (creating a virtual device), the pavucontrol and paprefs utilities have been an effective tool for me in GTK3 environments (pavucontrol-qt in Plasma). However, my use case is different, in that it is combining audio output to laptop speakers and a BT speaker column simultaneously via a virtual audio device.

I really do not know if this addresses your needs; I'm going more from @HilmTye's last suggestion. But I hope it helps in some way. (The same thing could almost assuredly be accomplished in dconf-editor or the like, but I am the impatient sort.)

Regards

---

UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things. -- Doug Gwyn

matchadoabot

Member

Registered: 2017-02-28

Posts: 2

Re: Audio in Display Manager and Chrome Remote Desktop Instance

@HilmTye and @c00ter, I just tried looking at paprefs and pavucontrol to no avail. Essentially, for Chrome Remote Desktop audio to work on XFCE, I just uncommented everything on daemon.conf and client.conf, as I mentioned in my first post. The problem with this approach is that when I login to Budgie normally (not through Chrome Remote Desktop), the sound card is no longer seen and Pulseaudio reports 'pa_context_connect() failed: Connection refused'. If I return to the default daemon.conf and client.conf, audio works in Budgie, but not in Chrome Remote Desktop (XFCE). Chrome Remote Desktop logs gives the same "Connection refused" error, only this time its in the remote desktop and not on my locally running Budgie Desktop. It seems I can only get one of them working at a time.

That was the first issue. The second issue issue was that on my login screen/display manager, I cannot hear any audio. A custom theme with a video is playing, but there is no audio coming out of my speakers. I do have a feeling this is also tied to Pulseaudio.

Thanks for all the help so far guys.