openSUSE 11.2 KDE, no pulseaudio = microphone works

English Soapbox
#1

If you remember my recent tread at
Updated ALSA, now modules won’t load - openSUSE Forums

I mentioned that my microphone works will stop recording after a brief moment and cause high CPU wakeup and become completely unusable until I restart ALSA. Unable to solve the problem, I went on to try how Ubuntu 9.10 and Fedora 12 (GNOME) fares. To no avail, both of these distro exhibit the same problem :(although to varying degree). Yet to receive reply from ALSA developer, it leads me to investigate the other possible cause of sound related problem: pulseaudio

So i did a complete reinstallation of openSUSE 11.2 but this time with the KDE option and making sure that no pulseaudio dependancies are pulled in by accident. Guess what? All the problem with the microphone went away. :open_mouth: And to top it, skype under linux no longer has the 2 second lag for my sound to reach the other end, which makes it unusable for me.

SO, openSUSE is working 100% for me right now! KDE + no pulseaudio = FTW!!! (Shame on you GNOME… Why the locked-in pulseaudio dependancy >:(>:()

(Anyway, anyone has ideas how to trace this pulseaudio bug so that I can report it upstream? I do want to use pulseaudio but it’s too buggy at the present moment)

#2

Glad to read it. I have also observed some irritating issues with Gnome and sound, likely due to pulse audio.

That can be a problem when one changes their configuration. When reporting a bug, its often best to leave the bug in place, and then work with the developer to solve it. If one has a PC with a large enough hard drive, and IF one is reasonably familiar with the grub boot manager, then one can setup separate / (root) partitions and separate /home partitions for KDE and gnome, and boot only into gnome when providing support to the alsa developer (openSUSE packager for sound).

#3

I do have experience with partitioning and setting up grub. Maybe after I’ve gotten a reply in bugzilla I’ll setup the GNOME environment again.

Cheers, enjoy your vacation oldcpu… :wink:

#4

There’s already loads of bugs filed on ALSA not working good with pulseaudio. Don’t know if this would add anything.