is it alsa or is it pulse ?

English Multimedia
1

Not a bug but more a request for information on opensuse 11.2 with KDE 4.3.5

I always was under the assumption that opensuse/KDE used Alsa but I am getting a bit unsure about if this is fully true.

Recently under Wine I have been getting the following message: AL lib: Pulseaudio.c:386 Contect did not get ready: Connection refused.

Now Wine has been set to Alsa for a long time now so it confused me, I did a rpm search on what exactly is installed and came up with this:

alsa-devel-1.0.21-3.2.i586
alsa-utils-1.0.21-3.1.i586
alsa-oss-1.0.17-25.2.i586
alsa-1.0.21-3.2.i586
alsa-plugins-1.0.21-3.3.i586

libpulse0-0.9.21-1.2.1.i586

The first set I expected and sort of showed me I am running Alsa. The last one I did not expect, so I figured it might be the cause of the error under Wine so I tried to remove it but it seems its used by 125 other entries including kde-base. So not a good idea I figured. Looking at the file list:

/usr/lib/libpulse-simple.so.0
/usr/lib/libpulse-simple.so.0.0.3
/usr/lib/libpulse.so.0
/usr/lib/libpulse.so.0.12.2
/usr/lib/libpulsecommon-0.9.21.so

I figured I move these 5 files and do a reboot to see what happens, before the reboot KDE multimedia showed HDA Intel as output device, after the reboot it showed ALSA and OSS as output devices.

Interestingly enough the wine application no longer gives the AL Lib Pulseaudio error and almost all other programs like amarok or opera/youtube give sound, except mplayer with does not like the idea of not being able to access libpulse.so.0.

The error message itself : Pulseaudio.c:386 Contect did not get ready: Connection refused. Is I think because no pulse daemon is running, again pointing towards it being Alsa, So to me it seems Alsa is the primary sound system but somewhere in between libpulse.so.0 is used, is this for compatibility reason so there does not need to be an mplayer for also and one for pulse or why ?

So my question is what is the deal here ?

Thank you for enlightening me :slight_smile:

2

By default openSUSE-11.2 KDE does not enable PULSE (however 11.2 Gnome does).

To learn more about your audio setup you can run the diagnostic script:

/usr/sbin/alsa-info.sh
3

thanks oldcpu, kde 4 base package might not enable Pulse, and I agree as the deamon and pulseaudio itself are not installed or enabled, but it does install libpulse0-0.9.21-1.2.1.i586 and some applications like mplayer seem to use it while other (125 in my case) say its a dependency, I figure its for compatibility then. A work around for my wine application is simply to hide /usr/lib/libpulse.so, start the application and unhide it again.

alsa info uploaded to http://www.alsa-project.org/db/?f=5c8a7df77956fe2637e030d0e006df24ffa74f0b

4

From the diagnostic script, if pulse was running, you would see it here:

!!Sound Servers on this system
!!----------------------------

ESound Daemon:
      Installed - Yes (/usr/bin/esd)
      Running - No

But only ESD is observable there.

5

I totally agree with you, none the less, libpulse0-0.9.21-1.2.1.i586 is installed, a dependency and its used, bootup with and without it and KDE will shows different soundcard options. That is what confuses me in the whole thing :slight_smile: