I am on Byzantium with the latest gnome-calls version (43.alpha.0).
Although the software being alpha, it came as an update through the app store. Unfortunately this version, and also the version before this one, has stability issues.
This morning I received a phone call with the screen off. The answer dialog showed up briefly, but the answer button was grey and did not respond to a press. Shortly thereafter, the dialog disappeared from the screen and left me with the lock screen with the phone still ringing. I unlocked the phone and opened the calls app. I briefly saw the answer dialog again before it disappeared while the phone continued to ring, this time with two simultaneous ring tones. Closing the calls app didn’t stop the ringing, so I had to restart the phone. I know I could have used killall gnome-calls in the terminal app, but restarting the phone seemed like a quicker way to handle the ruckus (I will create a desktop entry with the killall command for quick access in the future).
After the phone restarted, I again opened the calls app, which was not responding and not showing contact names in the recent list. After a few more reboots, the calls app was back to normal again.
Are there any log files I can supply to help track this issue?
Ok, did a journalctl now after another hickup, which is not uncommon for my L5, i.e. ongoing phone call interrupted by an incoming phone call breaks audio in Calls. I killed Calls with my little app above and restarted it, but never got any audio back. I might add that I was using an USB headset when it happened. Haven’t been able to get a working phone call after this. Got another incoming phone call, but no answer dialog while the phone kept ringing until I killed it.
Strange things are going on here. Anything specific I should look for in journalctl?
Edit: Found the bug report for disappearing call audio here.
For the lack of audio after killing the app, it might be worth looking at your Pulseaudio sources and sinks lists, you may have some echo-cancellation streams straggling.
The calls app creates these streams and then destroys them after a call, if you kill the app by some other means these streams may not get destroyed.
I did quite a bit of testing around call audio and, although I don’t recall the specifics, I did note it was possible to get into a situation whereby the echo-cancellation streams of a call did not get destroyed and when the next call happened additional streams were created but no audio was heard. Killing (unloading) the straggling streams resolved that issue for me.
To view the Pulseaudio sources…
pactl list short sources
…and sinks…
pactl list short sinks
You are looking for anything in the list with “echo-cancel” in the name, these should only be present during a call.
These lists look fine to me with nothing unusual. Yes, it is normal to see the sources and sinks listed as “SUSPENDED” when not in use, they will go IDLE for a short period of time and then if not being used will go to SUSPENDED.
I’m going from memory but I’m reasonably sure that if there were any straggling echo-cancellation streams they would’ve been destroyed when disconnecting the headset so that may be why you are not seeing them in the list.
Does audio get restored after a reboot? Or if using the phone’s own internal mics and speakers?
After a reboot usually, yes. This last time I didn’t get any call audio with internal mics and speakers when I tried placing a new call (before the reboot).
The latest calls (44.alpha.0) is very unstable. Sometimes it does not stop the ringing although the call has been answered and is in progress. Sometimes it crashes. Sometimes it answers a call and its window dissapears, the call continues but you have no access to controls (like hangup) unless you re-click on calls to restart.
Very annoying. How do I revert to previous version which was very stable?
No it does not work. apt list -a gnome-calls shows only the installed version and the versions available for upgrade. Not the possible installable versions. Not older versions.
@guru most probably you did not install the 43 version. You skipped from 42-alpha to 44-alpha.
I do not know in this case where from you could get the 43~beta which is good.
I can’t imagine. I do every day, sometimes more than one time, a sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade. The last modification time of the gnome-calls files in the archive a somewhat crazy:
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 281216 Oct 4 2021 gnome-calls_41~rc-1pureos2_arm64.deb
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 211652 Nov 9 2021 gnome-calls_41.1-1pureos1_arm64.deb
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 227824 Dec 15 2021 gnome-calls_42~alpha.0-1pureos1_arm64.deb
purism@pureos:/var/cache/apt/archives$ ls -ld /var/cache/apt/archives
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 73728 Dec 19 09:25 /var/cache/apt/archives
The modification time of the dir /var/cache/apt/archives is correct (yesterday).
