Discussion:
permissions for zoom
(too old to reply)
john connolly
2020-04-20 17:16:30 UTC
Permalink
Hi, I have used zoom a few times and have discovered that the sound
doesn't work when I use zoom as user but it does when I use it as root.
Is it necessary to run it as root and if not what permission(s) to I
have to change to get the sound to work as user?
Thanks, jwc
Lew Pitcher
2020-04-20 18:03:23 UTC
Permalink
Post by john connolly
Hi, I have used zoom a few times and have discovered that the sound
doesn't work when I use zoom as user but it does when I use it as root.
Is it necessary to run it as root and if not what permission(s) to I
have to change to get the sound to work as user?
Thanks, jwc
It would depend on which Slackware version you run, but...
try adding the group 'audio' to your user's supplementary groups.
Also, don't forget to unmute your mic

Hope this helps
--
Lew Pitcher
"In Skills, We Trust"
Rich
2020-04-20 18:15:04 UTC
Permalink
Post by john connolly
Hi, I have used zoom a few times and have discovered that the sound
doesn't work when I use zoom as user but it does when I use it as root.
Is it necessary to run it as root and if not what permission(s) to I
have to change to get the sound to work as user?
Thanks, jwc
Is the user (normal user) that is running zoom in the "audio" group?

If not, add that user to the "audio" group and logout/login as that
user to reset the group permissions for that user.
john connolly
2020-04-20 19:16:54 UTC
Permalink
Post by john connolly
Hi, I have used zoom a few times and have discovered that the sound
doesn't work when I use zoom as user but it does when I use it as root.
Is it necessary to run it as root and if not what permission(s) to I
have to change to get the sound to work as user?
Thanks, jwc
Thanks for the replies, I added user to the audio group and I now have
access to the sound icon so I guess the problem is resolved
Joe Rosevear
2020-09-27 17:28:26 UTC
Permalink
Post by john connolly
Hi, I have used zoom a few times and have discovered that the sound
doesn't work when I use zoom as user but it does when I use it as root.
Is it necessary to run it as root and if not what permission(s) to I
have to change to get the sound to work as user?
Thanks, jwc
Hi John,

I'm interested in your Zoom experiences, since I have recently
struggled to get Zoom working reliably on my Linux box. (I'm using
32bit Slackware 14.2 and Firefox 80.0.)

I mostly succeeded. I don't have sound issues anymore. I think my
sound problems were coming from my using a second, USB sound adapter in
addition to the internal sound adapter. Anyway I solved my sound
problem (my mic wasn't working, and perhaps sometimes I had no sound
also) by writing a script to configure the default source and sink and
the alsa audio settings. I run the script as root before using Zoom as
a regular user.

Perhaps it is significant that I'm not using the Zoom client. Although
I found one for Linux, I couldn't get it to work. It turns out that
Zoom doesn't need the client, it works (with some features missing)
without the client, but you need to (be bold and) click "join from your
browser".

I said I mostly succeeded. The problem I'm having is the Firefox tab
crashes sometimes. Perhaps it hasn't happened since I upgraded to
version 80.0--I don't recall the sequence of events.

-Joe
Joe Rosevear
2020-10-11 02:21:49 UTC
Permalink
Post by Joe Rosevear
Post by john connolly
Hi, I have used zoom a few times and have discovered that the sound
doesn't work when I use zoom as user but it does when I use it as root.
Is it necessary to run it as root and if not what permission(s) to I
have to change to get the sound to work as user?
Thanks, jwc
Hi John,
I'm interested in your Zoom experiences, since I have recently
struggled to get Zoom working reliably on my Linux box. (I'm using
32bit Slackware 14.2 and Firefox 80.0.)
I mostly succeeded. I don't have sound issues anymore. I think my
sound problems were coming from my using a second, USB sound adapter in
addition to the internal sound adapter. Anyway I solved my sound
problem (my mic wasn't working, and perhaps sometimes I had no sound
also) by writing a script to configure the default source and sink and
the alsa audio settings. I run the script as root before using Zoom as
a regular user.
Perhaps it is significant that I'm not using the Zoom client. Although
I found one for Linux, I couldn't get it to work. It turns out that
Zoom doesn't need the client, it works (with some features missing)
without the client, but you need to (be bold and) click "join from your
browser".
I said I mostly succeeded. The problem I'm having is the Firefox tab
crashes sometimes. Perhaps it hasn't happened since I upgraded to
version 80.0--I don't recall the sequence of events.
Following up on my own post...

I solved the problem of Firefox crashing, sort of. I switched to Alien
Bob's Chromium. To be fair, I must say that the Firefox crashes
happened only after it had been running Zoom for a period of
time--perhaps 30 minutes or more. I don't think I have actually tested
Chromium for that same period of time. On the other hand, I have used
it successfully, and I *believe* it will work fine. Chrome has gotten
good reports for use with Zoom, so perhaps Chromium is up to the task.

I should explain what I learned about the problem with Firefox. I
like Firefox, and I feel like I'm selling my soul to Google every time
I use any Google product. However, Firefox behaves as if it has a
memory leak. I ran top to see what was happening. I learned that the
memory use when running Zoom in Firefox slowly crept up until it
crashed the tab at about 2.5GB total use. I'm running 32bit Slackware,
so perhaps that was too close to 4.0 limit. Or something like
that--that's the best I can make of it.

There is an interesting story regarding my slow adoption of Alien Bob's
Chromium. I had installed it about three years ago, and it worked
fine. Eventually, that old version wasn't suitable anymore, and I
tried to use a newer one. It wouldn't run. Now can any of you smart
people out there guess what was happening?

I'm embarassed to say I only just figured it out last week. After about
six months of struggling with Firefox. The problem was that I hadn't
updated my Slackware 14.2 installation. Ha! That fixed it.

-Joe
Rich
2020-10-11 04:22:02 UTC
Permalink
However, Firefox behaves as if it has a memory leak. I ran top to
see what was happening. I learned that the memory use when running
Zoom in Firefox slowly crept up until it crashed the tab at about
2.5GB total use.
Do keep in mind that while browsers normally are bloated memory hogs,
memory leaks can trivially be caused by javascript running within a
given page that never gets closed out for a long time. There are
numerous javascript foot-guns available that if accidentally triggered,
leak memory until the tab holding the website is closed. So the effect
you saw could very well have been zoom doing something that resulted in
javascript memory being allocated but never garbage collected by
firefox.
I'm running 32bit Slackware, so perhaps that was too close to 4.0
limit. Or something like that--that's the best I can make of it.
Unless you have changed your default memory split for your kernel, on
32-bit an individual process is limited to 3G maximum memory usage.
Web browsers easily load .5G worth of shared libraries, so it is quite
believable that only 2.5G of remaining address space would remain for
allocation until the browser was "out of memory".

Is your CPU 64-bit capable? If yes, then upgrading to 64-bit would
allow your browser process to grow past 2.5G. Although this simply
means that, if it kept growing, that it would eventually start causing
swapping and you'd get a different issue (slowdowns for swapping)
instead of a hard crash.

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