Well, I took a chance today and did a dist-upgrade on my Antix-15 installation. Among other things, this replaced Iceweasel with Firefox-ESR. I looked in the Plug-ins Manager to see the flash player situation and it told me to upgrade the Adobe Flash Player to the latest version. I did so by downloading a tar.gz file from the Adobe website and following the instructions in the readme file. After this, the Plug-in Manager no longer had the warning that the flash player was out of date and insecure. So far, so good.

However, when I went to Youtube to play a music video there was no sound. The dist-upgrade also upgraded SMTube, so I went there and successfully played the same video using mpv as the backend player. I use only Alsa, by the way.

I don't know if this is relevant or not, but the dist-upgrade notified me that a few packages were no longer needed and could be autoremoved, which I did. I recall seeing at least one libgstreamer package among them. Could this have clobbered Firefox sound? I've read that doing a dist-upgrade can break some things, but it isn't clear if this is a Firefox problem or something is wrong in the system.

Also, I don't know if the video in question was HTML5 or Flash.

Prior to the dist-upgrade I had done a regular upgrade and noticed that some packages specific to Antix were updated.

Finally, I ran Firefox-ESR from a terminal and tried to play a music video. The following error message was shown:

1466286241795 addons.productaddons ERROR Request failed certificate checks: [Exception..."SSL is required
and URI scheme is not Https." nsresult:"0x8000fff (NS_ERROR_UNEXPECTED)" location:"JS frame ::
resource//gre/modules/CertUtils.jsm :: checkCert :: line 145" data: no]

I don't know if this has anything to do with the sound problem.

Thanks for any thoughts on this.

Andy N1KSN

You need to install pulseaudio since Firefox-ESR 'needs' it.

Thanks for the quick reply, anti. Much appreciated!

Man, I so wanted to avoid using Pulse Audio. Kind of runs against the philosophy of"lightweight" that I prefer.

Is Firefox-ESR the future preferred browser in Debian? The replacement of Iceweasel took me by surprise.

Although I prefer to use Links2 or Dillo for browsing, sometimes I need Firefox to use a website like Amazon. Do you have any suggestions for a full-feature browser that doesn't need Pulse Audio? Would there be any problem if I try to re-install Iceweasel (or is it really on the way out)?

Thanks again,
Andy

Iceweasel is gone. I've filed a bug with the Debian firefox folks but I haven't heard a response.

Try chromium. Flash might be an issue but youtube uses html5 these days.

I am using firefox-esr without pulseaudio. With default antix asound.conf HTML5 videos does not have sound, but if i renaming it, i getting sound in flash and HTML5 videos too.
I am not an ALSA expert, and does not understand what might be the real problem, but this way there is no need to install pulseaudio.

lorijan wrote:I am using firefox-esr without pulseaudio. With default antix asound.conf HTML5 videos does not have sound, but if i renaming it, i getting sound in flash and HTML5 videos too.
I am not an ALSA expert, and does not understand what might be the real problem, but this way there is no need to install pulseaudio.

That's interesting because I tried that and it didn't work. I'll give it another go thanks!

lorijan, great suggestion thanks! That does work as you indicate, so thank you.

however, it breaks the equalizer in the control center. I'll move it up the line thanks!

lorijan wrote:I am using firefox-esr without pulseaudio. With default antix asound.conf HTML5 videos does not have sound, but if i renaming it, i getting sound in flash and HTML5 videos too.
I am not an ALSA expert, and does not understand what might be the real problem, but this way there is no need to install pulseaudio.

If someone could explain how this was done. I would appreciate it.

Installed pulseaudio and I still have no sound.

Well, this is getting interesting. I tried both"solutions" and each of them worked for me.

First I installed pulseaudio as suggested by anti. The Youtube videos then played with sound just fine.

Second I removed pulseaudio and based on another suggestion I renamed asound.conf in the etc directory to asound.conf.old and rebooted. Once again, I got sound with the Youtube videos. And I went to the Control Center and opened the Alsa equalizer. I was able to change levels, but didn't test it otherwise as I don't use it.

For now I'll stick with the second solution, althougth taking a configuration file out of action by renaming it concerns me. I'd rather modify the file knowing what went wrong. But everything I care about sound-wise does seem to be working now so I'm happy while remaining ignorant.

As to alternate browsers, I have tried both Midori and Qupzilla and they were faster than Firefox. But each seemed to come up short in some way. I haven't tried Chromium, so that's on my to-do list. However, after my original post I remembered that I have Firefox installed on four other boxes and they are all synced to have the same bookmarks, etc. So that's pretty strong motivation to stick with Firefox-ESR on my notebook.

One last thing. When playing Youtube videos in Firefox-ESR the CPU usage in my HP Mini 210 notebook is nearly 100%. That is why most of my video playing is via SMTube or Streamlight2. Both have much, much less CPU usage. Also, I prefer to surf the net with Links2 or Dillo, but I still want to be able to play the occassional video embedded in a news website when browsing with Firefox.

I would mark this topic as SOLVED, but the solutions haven't worked for others, and the root cause remains mysterious--at least to me. So I'll leave it up to anti whether or not to consider this closed.

Thanks again to this Forum for being so responsive and helpful.

Cheers,
Andy N1KSN

As a follow-up to DO's suggestion, I installed Chromium. I also installed PepperFlash with it. No problems as yet, including playing videos on Youtube. It was very easy to import my bookmarks from Firefox/Iceweasel and to set up Ad Blocker, too. In terms of performance, I think Chromium might have an edge over Firefox-ESR, but not by much on this hardware.

I'm going to leave asound.conf inactivated (by renaming) and keep Firefox-ESR installed, as I have plenty of disk space.

Andy

Today a routine apt-get upgrade installed a new asound.conf file in the directory etc. Firefox-ESR plays Youtube videos with sound, so the underlying root cause must have been corrected.

Thanks, AntiX crew!

Andy N1KSN