[LAU] Some disturbing news

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Sat, 2 Jun 2018 19:29:35 -1000, david wrote:
>On 06/02/2018 06:54 PM, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
>> On Sat, 02 Jun 2018 16:52:05 -1000, David W. Jones wrote:  
>>> On June 2, 2018 2:32:13 PM HST, Paul Davis wrote:  
>>>> On Sat, Jun 2, 2018 at 8:17 PM, Fons Adriaensen wrote:  
>>>
>>> [snips]
>>>  
>>>> BTW, Firefox seems to have gone the same way as Skype.
>>>>
>>>> ​They still have a native ALSA backend and there's even a JACK one
>>>> available.​  
>>>
>>> Really? Where? The Firefox I have on Debian is exclusively Pulse.  
>> 
>> The Arch Linux firefox packages are build with
>> 
>> ac_add_options --enable-alsa
>> ac_add_options --enable-jack
>> 
>> However, if Debian packages shouldn't be build with alsa and/or jack,
>> you could install https://github.com/i-rinat/apulse to use alsa.
>> Unless you need jack, it's not worse to waste much time building
>> Firefox on your own, consider to use apulse.  
>
>I tried that. Didn't work here. But I use JACK, not ALSA.

apulse works for alsa only, for jack support you need to compile
firefox. When building firefox consider not to build in tmpfs, since
tmpfs might be to small.

$ df -h | grep tmpfs
tmpfs           3.9G  4.0K  3.9G   1% /dev/shm
tmpfs           3.9G     0  3.9G   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
tmpfs           3.9G  8.0K  3.9G   1% /tmp
tmpfs           786M   52K  786M   1% /run/user/1000

Since I migrated to another machine, I don't remember, but I guess
even the around 4 GiB were to small to build firefox.

FWIW this is how firefox is configured for Arch Linux:

$ grep ac_add_options /tmp/firefox/trunk/PKGBUILD 
ac_add_options --enable-application=browser
ac_add_options --prefix=/usr
ac_add_options --enable-release
ac_add_options --enable-gold
ac_add_options --enable-pie
ac_add_options --enable-optimize="-O2"
ac_add_options --enable-rust-simd
ac_add_options --enable-official-branding
ac_add_options --enable-update-channel=release
ac_add_options --with-distribution-id=org.archlinux
ac_add_options --with-google-api-keyfile=${PWD at Q}/google-api-key
ac_add_options --with-mozilla-api-keyfile=${PWD at Q}/mozilla-api-key
ac_add_options --with-system-zlib
ac_add_options --with-system-bz2
ac_add_options --enable-system-hunspell
ac_add_options --enable-system-sqlite
ac_add_options --enable-system-ffi
ac_add_options --enable-alsa
ac_add_options --enable-jack
ac_add_options --enable-startup-notification
ac_add_options --enable-crashreporter
ac_add_options --disable-updater

The Debian rules files are a PITA, see
https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/firefox , it anyway shouldn't be rocket
science to add the desired config flags. Note, firefox is bloated, it
takes much more time to build firefox, than to build a kernel or ardour.

If you want to build in tmpfs, you might want to make tmpfs larger than
half of the available memory. Assuming you are still using fstab, you
could add a line to /etc/fstab:

tmpfs          /tmp            tmpfs nodev,nosuid,size=[snip]G     0 0

Replace [snip] with a number, then reboot, or perhaps

sudo mount -a

does the job, too.