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 (see update below), 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.

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.

UPDATE: When I had logged into the root account to test mplayer, I did not fire up X11 to see how things were going with Firefox, the PulseAudio Plugin for xfce4, etc. Now I did, and everything is just fine there. The problems are only happening on my normal user account.

When was the last time you updated this system? To be precise, as root,

slackpkg update
slackpkg install-new
slackpkg upgrade-all

Is this a 32 bit sytem or is it 64 bit? ( i saw that is's a 14.2 release.

Thanks for your reply, camorri.

I guess... not ever. Actually, when I first installed Slackware (also 14.2), at one point when I was trying to enable multilib support (it was a 64-bit system, as is my current one) I think I tried to update the system but ended up messing everything up completely and needed to do a full reinstall. I'm pretty sure that my current system has never been updated.

Should I do it? Is it safe to just run the commands you listed? Won't anything break? I just never took the trouble to seriously look into how one would update the system up to this point, really.

You should definitely keep your system up to date, not least due to security issues.

Take a few minutes to read https://docs.slackware.com/slackware:beginners_guide

I do recommend you do an update. Many things have changed over the life of 14.2.
Yes, the commands are safe. Note, there are new kernels, and those commands, if used as listed will replace your kernel. Depending on which kernel you are using, generic, or huge, you have to rebuild the initrd.gz file and update lilo. The beginners guide covers that. If you need more guidance, don't hesitate to ask first.

Will things break? Not from the commands I listed, unless you upgrade the kernel, are using the generic kernel, and do not update the initrd.gz file, and run lilo.

What you can do, is run slackpkg upgrade-all, and de-select the kernel packages, there should be 5 of them. Let the system update, and test. Things will still run. You can manually update the kernel later. There are known security problems in the older kernels.

Let us know how you make out.

Hello everyone, and thanks once again.

I have just updated my system, as instructed, except that I left out the five kernel packages. All the problems mentioned in my original post still persist on my original normal user account. Since I had observed that apparently everything was just fine with the root account, I figured the problems had to do with some misconfiguration on my usual account (which I still have no idea of where it could have come from). I have added a second user account to my system, which I'm using right now, and most things seem to be fine here: at least media playback is working normally with Firefox/xine, Firefox is not crashing, the PulseAudio Plugin icon is on my toolbar; only the MediaFire website is still messed up. (I can upload attachments to emails in Outlook normally, though.)

Despite all that, I still would like to know what could be wrong with my original account so as to be causing these problems.

By the way, my computer is an UEFI system, and I don't use LILO, but GRUB. I followed a YouTube video to set up a GRUB boot screen which allows for dual-booting between Slackware and Windows 8. (Previously I always had to use a USB boot stick if I wanted to boot up Slackware.) I don't actually know how to configure this boot stuff, especially if I wanted to, say, update the kernel or switch to the generic one.

A UEFI system is easy enough to update with new kernels. I know next to nothing about grub2, I did use the original grub, over five years ago.

If you go to your /boot, you will see another directory called efi. Go there, and do a ls -l command. You should see another EFI dir. Change there, and you should see 2 dirs, one for Windows8 files and one for Slackware.

If you go into the Slackware directory, you will see the Slackware kernel(s) initrd.gz file and what ever grub needs. Basically you have to copy the kernel(s) from /boot to this location on the efi partition. Grub may need updating, however, I'm not sure. BTW, I use e-lilo to boot, since I have no Windows on my system.

It does sound like you have some config problems on your old user, if things are working correctly on a new ID. A lot of programs have things saved in hidden directorys. Often you can simply deleted these hidden dirs, and new ones will be created. You would have to re-configure any changes you had made before.

I hope these thoughts help.

Hello again, everyone! Sorry for the delay.

camorri, those thoughts were helpful indeed, so thank you for sharing them! I did compare the names of the hidden directories/files in my new user against the ones in my original user, so I decided to follow your suggestion and deleted all the hidden directories/files in my original user whose names matched those in the new user. Now things in my original user are just as good as in the new user. As for MediaFire, perhaps it has to do with some compatibility problems between their website and my OS/browser, because the website works fine on Windows. Another problem that I experienced is that I could not join an online video meeting on a particular conference website, which, again, I could do on Windows. On the other hand, I was able to join a meeting on Google Meet normally with Slackware/Firefox. I don't suppose anyone might have any ideas about these. In any case, I'm already quite satisfied for the facts that media playback and PulseAudio are back to normal, and Firefox is not randomly crashing anymore. (I'm still puzzled about how the configuration files had suddenly gotten messed up like that, though.)

As for updating the kernel, you did encourage me to take a step forward and to try to somewhat figure out the /boot/ directory for a start. I did inspect the contents of /boot/efi/EFI/. There was a folder for Microsoft and one for Slackware; the only thing I found in the latter, though, was a PE32+ executable named grubx64.efi. The one thing I had to do after upgrading the kernel packages through
was to run
and the next time I booted the system the entry for Slackware in the GRUB menu caused the updated kernel to load.

From what I could gather about how GRUB2 works, the file /boot/grub/grub.cfg defines the menu that appears at boot time (including what each entry does), except that this file (normally) should not be edited directly: rather, one edits the files in /etc/grub.d/ and then runs
to apply the updates to the GRUB menu.

In my case, when I ran grub-mkconfig as mentioned above, the entry for Windows 8 had disappeared from among the boot options in the GRUB menu, but that's probably because I must have edited my original grub.cfg file manually, instead of tweaking the files in /etc/grub.d/, as I should have done. This is not a problem for me, though; I should look into that later.

Once again, thanks a lot, everyone!

Glad you sorted most of the problems you ran into.

On rare occasions I have seen corruct hidden files cause problems. I can only guess what conditoiions cause such problems. Possibly hard drive problems, or sudden loss of power for external problems you can not control; (lightning strike) for example.

Grub; I don't use it, Slackware loads just file with elilo, no good reason to change that. For that reason I can not offer any advice on maintaining Grub config files.

Zoom is the only video conferencing application I have used. You may have to look at any support information for the applications you are still having problems with.

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