04 January, 2009

firefox 3 alsa bug

I was upgrading my laptop from FC8 to FC10. All appeared to be flawless at first sight, but when I customized firefox 3 to enable fire.fm plugin I got crazy 'cause firefox just crashed and nothing else happened.

I started firefox from a gnome terminal, and got the error:

ALSA lib pcm_pulse.c:629 (pulse_prepare) PulseAudio: Unable to create stream: Invalid argument

and many messages saying it couldn't allocate memory.

What a mess!! I googled it without success, tough I realized it wasn't really a problem with the plugin, or even with firefox, but with alsa and pulseaudio alsa plugin. Furthermore, I had the same issue trying to watch youtube videos, the video starts to load and I could see images, but when the sound starts to play, firefox crashes. I upgrade them all and nothing improved.

What I did to solve the issue -plus the upgraded packages- is to disable the firefox out-of-the-box shockwave flash plugin and to download the latest one from adobe site (yum is supported wow!!), installed it, restarted firefox and voilá, all working!!

Hope it should help someone else.

H