How to safely remove/disable pulse audio?

Hello All,

I had a computer melt down that forced me to buy new and start fresh. Various problems left me without a working machine for about a week, as expected I am a little behind in my work. 

I had a strange problem with my sound. With a lot of forum help, and good ol' debugging, I managed to narrow it down to pulseaudio. So now I want to either disable it or remove it. 

Yet, I am a little wary of simply un-installing it in Yast blindly. I don't want something corrupted that forces me to re-install everything. I have already lost a week with computer frustration.

Can wise old Linux gurus give me some tips? How can I save my current sound set-up, so I can restore it when I make a mistake? What are the configuration/scripts that govern audio set up? Please, others that have had to remove pulse audio, share your experiences and pitfalls. I would prefer to simply disable it, just in case the libraries are important for other components. Yet if that cannot be done, then I want to remove it.

Thanks
PilotMM

PS: FYI I am aware of the post below, I would like to know more, and have a back-up before I try anything. Thanks

PulseAudio KDE4 dependency - openSUSE Forums

PPS: Confession, I am genuinely curious how sound is dealt with in KDE/Linux. In my reading so far I have been made aware of ALSA, Phonom, pulseaudio, and other components involved in sound. I want to learn how all these components (along with the ones I am not aware of) work together. Is there anything I can read to learn about how audio works in openSuse 11.1 (or Linux or KDE 4)

PPPS: Also, I know about the linux boot process. I like to tweak things there. However, the KDE start-up is a mystery to me. I would like to know how KDE starts as well. Any suggested reads there would be great too.

As stated in the link you gave You can remove everything except libpulse0. Did this on my machine as i was having audio problems

Geoff

Hi Geoffro.
I have seen you have the most recent KDE 4.2.4 installed. Have you experienced still problems with pulseaudio even in this recent version?
I had to disinstall it today in kde 3.5 because suddenly, after the latest updates, I had no sound in firefox with .flv and vlc videos anymore.

Hello All

I used a SLAX live CD to get an image of my root partition, and my boot partition. Then I successfully removed pulse audio. I never had to rely on the image (very relieved about that). So far everything seems to be working, and the original problem is gone. Let me tell you how it all went:

I burned the iso for SLAX Live DVD Version 6.1.1. You have to go to the slax website to enable the partimage module. This is the imaging software that allows you to make copies of partitions. In addition, you have to enable a specific library. I cannot remember what one, but you can tell by the error message given by partimage. Also, after activating the library, I still had to symbolically link the library. The installed version is a later version than the one that partimage is looking for. It seems to be backwards compatible, so I had no problems. partimage was fairly easy to use, so nothing special there. 

Once I rebooted, I went straight to Yast and removed all the pulseaudio components with one exception, I kept libpulse0. Naturally Yast suggested I remove various pulseaudio subcomponents and suggested I add some other component (that had nothing to do with pulseaudio). In all cases I accepted the first choice Yast gave me. Once complete I let Yast do its thing.

After a reboot, all my audio problems were gone. Very happy now. I have not noticed any problems. So life is good. 

I hope this helps others. I just want to thank everyone who helped me out. The audio problem was quite strange and I had to rely on several threads so there are numerous people that got me to this point. I could not have done it without you all. Thanks a lot. 

Take Care
PilotMM

Hello All

Well first off I just wanted to thank everyone who offered help. I finally have fixed my problem. I posted to several threads, so I have summarized them below with links. So if you are having similar problems you can read about my experience below. I have tried to give detailed accounts. So hopefully there is enough information that you can fix it a lot easier than it was for me. 

Take Care
PilotMM

Original Post when I first noticed the problem:
Sound routed to wrong audio channel - openSUSE Forums

An attempt at using a work-around solution:
What is the startup process - openSUSE Forums

Armed with new information I made several posts about the debugging process:
Applications cannot share sound channels - LinuxQuestions.org

Once the problem was identified I used this thread to discuss what I did to resolve the problem:
How to safely remove/disable pulse audio? - openSUSE Forums

Had this same problem with my laptop and 2 desktops. All openSuse 11.1 with KDE 3.5.10, and updates to 20th July 2009. Firefox 3.0.11 with the LQ Forums recommended multimedia plugins.

Before the fix - audio works in Kaffeine, Amarok, KRecord, Audacity, etc, but not on BBC News website or iPlayer. Returns about 1 time in 6 after rebooting.

The fix - read around on openSuse & LQ forums, and found this thread. Opened YaST, and searched for “pulse”. List of PulseAudio and related plugins appears. Right click on list, and select “All in This List > Delete”. First error message has 3 choices. 1st choice is to install about 11 alternative packages from Packman repo. Select 2nd choice “keep libpulse0-xxx”, “OK” > “Accept”, warning "Automatic change will add package - “esound-daemon”. Click “Continue”, reboot, all now OK.

Hopefully this will be a long term fix till they sort out whatever got broken. I use Audacity quite a lot, and had to change the input/output processor settings to ALSA. Haven’t found any other applications with problems yet.