How to uninstall Pulseaudio and install esound

English Hardware
1

Hi, I’m running OpenSuSe 11.1 32 bits gnome and I’m having major problems with sound all due to Pulseaudio.

  • While loading webvideos on, for example, youtube.com, I get a high volume strange sound for 3 seconds before almost every video. I know libflashsupport and pulseaudio don’t like each other, but I have no alternative to flash…

  • Sounds and music played on banshee or totem which use gstreamer and thus Pulseaudio are stuttering and skipping when I do something other than just listening.

  • Sound works well when using only ALSA, as I have proved using ‘aplay’ or skype, or the test sounds on the sound configuration tool.

I went thought this guide: PulseAudio - openSUSE

Which ultimately suggests one could remove pulse and install esound.

So I want to uninstall Pulseaudio. I have read some threads that people have done it successfully, but when I went to Yast to remove all pulse related packages and I found some dependency problems with some ‘libcanberra’ package. I’m afraid to mess this up, as this has been like the 5th SuSe 11.1 install this week and I’m sick of all the bugs I have in my sound…

So how do I set this up? Also, once I add all the related esound packages, will the automatically work with firefox, libsupportflash, banshee and gstreamer?

I need some help pleaaaasee

Andres

2

Not a gnome user but you can disable Pulseaudio in yast.
Go to hardware > sound select your sound card then click other on the bottom right
click Pulseaudio configuration and uncheck enable Pulseaudio support.

/Geoff

3

That was disabled by default, but firefox and gstreamer were already using it, and thus banshee, totem and whatever other program makes use of gstreamer.

:frowning:

4

I had a similar problem. Had sound in mplayer and amarok and in firefox and opera with the mplayer plugin, but no sound in flash vids like on youtube. Occasionally when I would have sound on youtube I got the same loud “braaappp” at the start of each vid.

I used yast to uninstall pusleaudio, YAST>Software Management>(search for “pulse”) then check to “x” delete pulsaudio and it’s associated libs. Yast then installed esound as part of the package check.

Flash works now.

5

Thanks for the advice. Unfortunately GNOME uses Pulseaudio heavily and trying to fully remove it results in some dependency issues and it attempts to uninstall gnome-desktop!

I tried KDE without pulseaudio but I got into trouble with the mp3 codecs… which are used by gstreamer which in turn needs pulseaudio…

6

Hi guys,
I also have many problems which are probably caused by Pulse Audio. I googled a little bit and found this tutorial. I was made by Ilfirin and originaly is in Czech, so I translated it to English. I was written for Opensuse 11.0 Gnome, but I suppose it should be the same for 11.1:

  1. remove all which is related to pulse audio:
    zypper rm pulse

remove pavucontrol:
zypper rm pavucontrol

lock to prevent installing it again:
zypper addlock pulse, zypper addlock pavucontrol

  1. Gnome becames little bit slower because trying to find esound (which was emulated by puseaudio)
    so install esound:
    zypper in esound

Modification of volume control to run gnome-volume-control instead pavucontrol (which was removed).
Ilfirin made a link of the package gnome-applets from GNOME:STABLE and made patch nopulse.diff (which only removes 2 rows from spec file) with patch gnome-applets-use-pulseaudio.patch.
So add home:ilfirin and reinstall (update) gnome-applets, or use one-click:
http://software.opensuse.org/ymp/home:ilfirin/openSUSE_11.0/gnome-applets.ymp

I hope, this will help. I did not use it yet, but going to try it in few days so I can let you know about the result.

PS: link to original article is here:
http://www.opensuse.cz/kategorie/tipy-triky/jak-odstranit-pulse-audio-z-opensuse-11-0-gnome

7

For those of you unfortunate souls having problems with pulse audio, this solution works.

Please also take some time to give feedback on how pulse audio should not be the default audio install until it is ready and stable enough for production use.

You can post a message here:

https://features.opensuse.org/305888
8

Good lol! : I did it and I finally have sound! Thank you very much!
Bad :sarcastic: : I still don’t have sound in Flash and Skype crashes in the moment it finishes the login. Running skype from the command line I get this error:

alsbraga@robocop:~> skype
ALSA lib conf.c:3009:(snd_config_update_r) Cannot access file /etc/alsa-pulse.conf
ALSA lib control.c:909:(snd_ctl_open_noupdate) Invalid CTL hw:0
Abortado

I suppose it is natural that the “/etc/alsa-pulse.conf” should not be there because I got rid of pulseaudio.

I searched the web for days and couldn’t find a solution.

Any help will be welcome.
Thanks :slight_smile:

9

I managed to have sound in Skype and in flash. Just edited the file /etc/environment and removed the variables ALSA_CONFIG_PATH and SDL_AUDIODRIVER. When they are not set, it will default to the alsa configuration.

Actually, what I did is to leave the variables but point them to nothing, jst in case:

ALSA_CONFIG_PATH=
SDL_AUDIODRIVER=

I couldn’t make the internal microphone work. It always appear with volume set to 0 in alsamixer. Doesn’t matter if I change it, when I get back to the program it is on 0 again.

Keep on trying. :slight_smile:

10

Hello Helioos, I uninstalled pulseaudio using your method and my graphical desktop (KDE) has also been uninstalled. I tried to install gnome instead but an error occurred.

I tried to instal esound but the package was not in the repositories or not known.
Still no sound in Youtube!!

11

i dont get it what do you mean zypper ? Heliooos