user environment diff btwn firefox launched from cli & firefox launched from the menu

[brian mullan]

Recently I was some implementing some LXC desktop environments and came across a difference regarding Firefox when started from the CLI or started from a Menu.

In my use-case I use the Pulseaudio module module-native-protocol-tcp in the Host to allow the LXC desktops to redirect their sound/audio to the Host's speakers.

in particular... this is done by adding the following to /etc/pulse/system.pa & restarting Puluseaudio or rebooting once.

              load-module module-native-protocol-tcp auth-ip-acl=127.0.0.1;10.0.3.0/24

Then in each LXC container user's .bashrc I add:

              export PULSE_SERVER=10.0.3.1

Which redirects sound in the LXC container to 10.0.3.1 which is the Host & the Host's Pulseaudio server.

aplay /usr/share/sounds/alsa/Front_Center.wav tests that the sound is directed to the Host Pulseaudio server ok and other apps like VLC work fine also in the container.

However, I found that only with Firefox (and Chrome) launched from the Ubuntu menu there was no sound/audio.

If I launched either Firefox or Chrome from the CLI where the User environment had the PULSE_SERVER=10.0.3.1 then sound worked fine (youtube for instance).

After digging around I found that launching from the Ubuntu menu doesn't execute the Firefox binary directly but via a shell script in /var/lib/firefox/firefox.sh.

If I add: "export PULSE_SERVER=10.0.3.1" to the top of firefox.sh then Sound DOES work when launching Firefox in an LXC container by clicking on its icon in the menu.

I decided to file a bug on this because I'd expect that the User "environment" for Firefox should be the same whether launched from CLI or from the menu.