Audacity doesn't open on Samsung Chromebook running Ubuntu

Hello everyone-- here’s my dream, simply enough: I want to use my Samsung Chromebook (which doesn’t have any moving parts) to record audio. Starting out with a weird processor (ARM) and a non-standard operating system, this was a fairly complicated task. Here’s where I’m at so far:

1.) I installed Chrubuntu 13.04, a xubuntu variant, using this tutorial. http://www.whatthetech.info/installing-ubuntu-13-04-samsung-chromebook/
2.) I got at least the sound playback fixed using: http://www.whatthetech.info/fixing-sound-chromebook-chrubuntu/

My next step is getting Audacity to run, but so far no luck! I’ve installed Audacity using both Ubuntu’s software manager and the Synaptic kit, just in case there was some slight deviation, but after installing Audacity and opening it in Applications/Multimedia/Audacity, nothing happens! (I am currently using the Synaptic repository). If you try to run it a second time, it presents the following error message:
"The system has detected that another copy of Audacity running.
Running two copies of Audacity simultaneously may cause data loss or cause your system to crash.

Use the New or Open commands in the currently running Audacity process to open multiple projects simultaneously." (OK)

After rebooting, I fired up the terminal emulator and tried audacity and got:

user@localhost:-$ audacity
ALSA lib pcm.c:2217(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM cards.pcm.front
ALSA lib pcm.c:2217(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM cards.pcm.rear
ALSA lib pcm.c:2217(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM cards.pcm.center_lfe
ALSA lib pcm.c:2217(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM cards.pcm.side
ALSA lib pcm.c:2217(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM cards.pcm.surround40
ALSA lib pcm.c:2217(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM cards.pcm.surround41
ALSA lib pcm.c:2217(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM cards.pcm.surround50
ALSA lib pcm.c:2217(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM cards.pcm.surround51
ALSA lib pcm.c:2217(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM cards.pcm.surround71
ALSA lib pcm.c:2217(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM cards.pcm.iec958
ALSA lib pcm.c:2217(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM cards.pcm.iec958
ALSA lib pcm.c:2217(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM cards.pcm.iec958
ALSA lib pcm.c:2217(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM cards.pcm.hdmi
ALSA lib pcm.c:2217(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM cards.pcm.hdmi
ALSA lib pcm.c:2217(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM cards.pcm.modem
ALSA lib pcm.c:2217(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM cards.pcm.modem
ALSA lib pcm.c:2217(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM cards.pcm.phoneline
ALSA lib pcm.c:2217(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM cards.pcm.phoneline
bt_audio_service_open: connect() failed: Connection refused (111)
bt_audio_service_open: connect() failed: Connection refused (111)
bt_audio_service_open: connect() failed: Connection refused (111)
bt_audio_service_open: connect() failed: Connection refused (111)
ALSA lib pcm_dmix.c:957:(snd_pcm_dmix_open) The dmix plugin supports only playback stream
Cannot connect to server socket err = No such file or directory
Cannot connect to server request channel
jack server is not running or cannot be started
Expression 'ret' failed in 'src/hostapi/alsa/pa_linux_alsa.c', line: 1670
Expression 'AlsaOpen( &alsaApi->baseHostApiRep, params, streamDir, &self->pcm  )' failed in 'src/hostapi/alsa/pa_linux_alsa.c', line: 1830
Expression 'PaAlsaStreamComponent_Initialize( &self->capture, alsaApi, inParams, StreamDirection_In, NULL != callback )' failed in 'src/hostapi/alsa/pa_linux_alsa.c', line: 2092
Expression 'PaAlsaStream_Initialize( stream, alsaHostApi, inputParameters, outputParameters, sampleRate, framesPerBuffer, callback, streamFlags, userData )' failed in 'src/hostapi/alsa/pa_linux_alsa.c', line: 2764

Any ideas?

Please let me know if I need to provide any other info.

Notably, when I’m not using the emulation and go directly to the terminal via ctrl+alt+F1, I get a different error

Failed to initialize gtk, is DISPLAY set properly?

You could be waiting a while. I don’t think that any of the forum regulars have an ARM computer so we may not be able to help much if at all. Personally, I have no idea if Audacity can run on an ARM processor (but I’d be interested to know if you manage to get it working

Well that shows that it is trying to start and is getting as far as creating the “lock file”.

Note that Audacity start up can be slow on Ubuntu (I think it’s due to some convoluted sound set-up, which gives rise to all of those messages in the terminal). When I say “slow”, I mean, even on a full size modern computer, so it could be extremely slow to start if you’ve got the little Atom processor.

Once the lock file exists, new instances of Audacity are “locked out”, so you may need to manually delete the lock file before a second attempt to launch.
On a regular Debian machine the lock file is in /var/tmp/audacity-/ and has the file name audacity-lock- (where “” is your user name).

That only seems to cover audio playback. Does AlsaMixer show any “Capture” (recording) devices? I think that Audacity requires at least one recording device to be available.

If there is a recording device, check to see if it works, for example with arecord http://www.linuxcommand.org/man_pages/arecord1.html

Yes, I think I might be the first/only human being to attempt this feat. (I’ve seen elsewhere that others have gotten Audacity working on chrubuntu, but I’m not sure if they had ARM processors or not).

Thanks a bunch for the reply! I’m going to activate a playback device and see if I can’t get Audacity to run after that.

Yes Audacity has basic ARM support but it’s only compilable on Linux (GCC) under normal circumstances. There was a post on audacity-devel a year ago from someone who built Audacity 2.0.0 on Fedora 14 on an ARM machine (their problem was that Fedora disabled MP3 import).

I also found a report recently that someone had apparently got Audacity to build and run on Windows RT (the ARM version of Windows 8) by a lot of effort with the Visual Studio project file, but without much by way of ARM optimisation.


Gale

This guy seems to have gotten it to work with no problems.

https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/chromebook-central/99glmCbTqIY

Hmm. I’m not really sure what I should be activating in ALSA mixer and I’m a bit hesitant to mess about with it given the warnings elsewhere about frying speakers, etc. Any clues as to what I should be enabling?

I think you’re unlikely to fry your speakers as long as you are sensible - I doubt that the audio output of the Chromebook has enough juice to fry speakers, but if in doubt, use some dirt cheap headphones 'till its all working properly.