Firefox suddenly not playing video/audio media and randomly crashing + xfce4 PulseAudio Plugin icon gone
by lucasb from LinuxQuestions.org on (#59GE9)
Hello all,
I have been using Slackware 14.2 on my laptop for some three years or so and things have always run rather smoothly for the most part. Two days ago, though, Firefox and PulseAudio have started to present strange behavior right out of the blue.
It isn't usual for me to perform any system administration tasks on my box, really; and I don't remember doing anything of the sort recently, let alone something that could be related to this sudden change of behavior in the above mentioned software.
Some two or three weeks ago I updated Firefox from the version that came with Slackware (it was something around 45.x) to the latest version (81.x) using a script by Ruari Oedegaard, and things were running just fine like they always had. That's about the last time I had logged into the root account to modify anything in the system, as far as I can remember. But, for some seemingly inexplicable reason, two days ago Firefox suddenly lost the ability to playback video/audio on any website (I've tested media from YouTube and SoundCloud), and furthermore it started to randomly crash when opening a tab, typing some address on the address bar and hitting enter. Another problem which I have just come upon is that I apparently can no longer upload files to my MediaFire account; whenever I try to, it says there was some network problem. I also have the latest Firefox installed on Windows on this very same machine and none of these things are happening there.
I have tried tweaking hardware acceleration and tracking protection preferences in the browser as suggested in some pages on the web, but to no avail. I have furthermore tried removing Firefox completely and installing the latest version available from slackpkg (68.12.0) but the same problems persist.
At the very same time in which I started having these issues with Firefox, I had noticed that the PulseAudio volume control icon was gone from my xfce4 toolbar. I then tried to play an audio file with mplayer from the Linux Console with my normal user account and found that it wouldn't play at all. I then logged into the root account, tried the same thing, and it did play normally. After a quick internet search, I added an .asoundrc file with the content listed below to the home directory of my normal user account, and media playback is now back to normal with mplayer, but I have just made a test with xine and it is not working; also the PulseAudio icon is still missing from the toolbar.
Code:pcm.!default {
type hw
card 0
}
ctl.!default {
type hw
card 0
}I could gladly use some help here, because I have no idea of what is going on, nor of what to do.
Thanks in advance.
I have been using Slackware 14.2 on my laptop for some three years or so and things have always run rather smoothly for the most part. Two days ago, though, Firefox and PulseAudio have started to present strange behavior right out of the blue.
It isn't usual for me to perform any system administration tasks on my box, really; and I don't remember doing anything of the sort recently, let alone something that could be related to this sudden change of behavior in the above mentioned software.
Some two or three weeks ago I updated Firefox from the version that came with Slackware (it was something around 45.x) to the latest version (81.x) using a script by Ruari Oedegaard, and things were running just fine like they always had. That's about the last time I had logged into the root account to modify anything in the system, as far as I can remember. But, for some seemingly inexplicable reason, two days ago Firefox suddenly lost the ability to playback video/audio on any website (I've tested media from YouTube and SoundCloud), and furthermore it started to randomly crash when opening a tab, typing some address on the address bar and hitting enter. Another problem which I have just come upon is that I apparently can no longer upload files to my MediaFire account; whenever I try to, it says there was some network problem. I also have the latest Firefox installed on Windows on this very same machine and none of these things are happening there.
I have tried tweaking hardware acceleration and tracking protection preferences in the browser as suggested in some pages on the web, but to no avail. I have furthermore tried removing Firefox completely and installing the latest version available from slackpkg (68.12.0) but the same problems persist.
At the very same time in which I started having these issues with Firefox, I had noticed that the PulseAudio volume control icon was gone from my xfce4 toolbar. I then tried to play an audio file with mplayer from the Linux Console with my normal user account and found that it wouldn't play at all. I then logged into the root account, tried the same thing, and it did play normally. After a quick internet search, I added an .asoundrc file with the content listed below to the home directory of my normal user account, and media playback is now back to normal with mplayer, but I have just made a test with xine and it is not working; also the PulseAudio icon is still missing from the toolbar.
Code:pcm.!default {
type hw
card 0
}
ctl.!default {
type hw
card 0
}I could gladly use some help here, because I have no idea of what is going on, nor of what to do.
Thanks in advance.