Hello World, 

In our previous post, we have released our famous xrdp-installer script that would provide support for Ubuntu 22.10 recently released.  Ubuntu 22.10 has introduced an important change in terms of Sound Server.  Indeed,  PulseAudio Sound Server has been replaced by Pipewire. This change has an impact on the xrdp sound redirection feature.  Since xrdp sound redirection is built and expecting PulseAudio Sound server, on Ubuntu 22.10, this feature is obviously not available.   

I had a lot of request in order to provide a post that would explain how to get PulseAudio back on Ubuntu 22.10 so xrdp sound redirection would be working again.  After some quick tests we have been able to bring back PulseAudio and test again the xrdp sound redirection… 

So, let’s explain how to do this….

Disable PipeWire & Enabled PulseAudio in Ubuntu 22.10

The following section will explain how to bring back Pulseaudio on Ubuntu 22.10 which will then allow you to get xrdp sound redirection capabilities back into your system.   

Disclaimer

Disabling PipeWire – Step by Step 

Step 1 – Find all Pipewire service in use 

You will first need to find all Pipewire services running on your Ubuntu machine.  Indeed, first time we tried, we identified only the Pipewire service but there are actually more services running.  So, to find all of them, we have used the following command  

systemctl --user --no-legend --no-pager | grep pipewire*

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As you can see, we have basically 4 services that needs to be disabled in order to get rid of Pipewire completely 

Step 2 – stop the service 

In order to stop all the running pipewire services, we will open a terminal console and issue the following command 

systemctl --user stop pipewire.service pipewire.socket pipewire-pulse.service pipewire-pulse.socket

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Step 3 – disable the services 

After we have stopped the services, we can disable them by issuing the following command 

systemctl --user disable pipewire.service pipewire.socket pipewire-pulse.service pipewire-pulse.socket

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Step 4 – mask the services 

Finally, to avoid any mistakes or problems in the future, we can mask these services by issuing the following command 

systemctl --user mask pipewire.service pipewire.socket pipewire-pulse.service pipewire-pulse.socket

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Step 5 – reboot the server 

To be sure that everything works accordingly, it’s recommended to reboot the machine.  

Step 6 – Check that no sound server available 

After the machine has rebooted, we will ensure that no more Sound Server is available on your machine by running the following command 

pactl info

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Enabling Pulseaudio – Step by Step 

Step 1 – install PulseAudio 

Since the PulseAudio software has been removed from Ubuntu 22.10, you will first need to install it back on your system by issuing the following command 

sudo apt-get install pulseaudio

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Step 2 – Enable PulseAudio 

After installing the Pulseaudio package, it’s time to enable it so it can start when user logs in. To do that, you will need to issue the following command 

systemctl --user enable pulseaudio.service pulseaudio.socket 

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Step 3- reboot 

We recommend to reboot the computer in order to be sure that the configuration is applying correctly.  After the reboot, you 

Step 4 – Check That PulseAudio is back 

After the machine has rebooted, you can check that Pulseaudio Sound server is back on your system and it’s running.  You can do that by issuing the following command 

pactl info

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To enable sound redirection xRDP, download our famous xrdp-installer script and perform the installation including sound redirection option. So, to summarize, you will need to execute the following code in a Terminal Console

cd ~/Downloads
wget https://www.c-nergy.be/downloads/xRDP/xrdp-installer-1.4.4.sh
unzip xrdp-installer-1.4.4.zip
chmod +x xrdp-installer-1.4.4.sh
./xrdp-installer-1.4.4.sh -l -s

When the script completes, you should see the message informing you that installation for the sound redirection has completed successfully.  You can now logoff from your ubuntu machine and perform the remote connection 

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If everything went fine,  you will get sound redirection working on your Ubuntu 22.10 system. 

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Rollback your configuration  

If you need to get your original configuration back, you can easily perform a rollback by following the following steps.  You open a Terminal Console and you get execute the following commands 

#Stop Pulse Audio service 
systemctl --user stop pulseaudio.service pulseaudio.socket

#Disable Pulse Audio service 
systemctl --user disable pulseaudio.service pulseaudio.socket
#Mask Pulse Audio service
systemctl --user mask pulseaudio.service pulseaudio.socket

#UnMask PipeWire service
systemctl --user mask pipewire.service pipewire.socket pipewire-pulse.service pipewire-pulse.socket

#Enable Pipewire service back again
systemctl --user enable pipewire.service pipewire.socket pipewire-pulse.service pipewire-pulse.socket

#Start the service again
systemctl --user start pipewire.service pipewire.socket pipewire-pulse.service pipewire-pulse.socket

Reboot the computer and when the computer restarts, login and ensure that you have Pipewire Sound server running by executing the following command 

pactl info

The output should be something like this (Pipewire on PulseAudio)

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Final Notes

Voila !  This is it for this post…  

As you can see, it’s not too difficult to get back, on your Ubuntu 22.10, Pulseaudio sound server.  The Pulseaudio Sound server is needed if you want to get xrdp sound redirection capability. xrdp sound redirection modules are expecting Pulseaudio Server in order to work as expected.  As far as I know, it’s not possible to have sound redirection working (using xrdp package) when running Pipewire even if documentation and some readers have mentioned the pipewire-pulse components that suppose to be a Pulseaudio replacements

If time permits, we will look to see if the existing xrdp sound redirection modules could be loaded against the Pipewire Sound server. We do not know if this is possible and we are expecting that the team behind the xrdp package would start providing some information about supporting Pipewire server.. 

Till next time 

See ya