Pulseaudio (to be fair)

[consused]

Yes, and two amusing posts in one thread on the same day. lol!lol!

[robopensuse]

@consused

Let me guess. The other OSes kept it in development until it worked, by thoroughly testing it, before releasing to GA. What was the “must have it” need that pushed it out in 11.1? Do tell, but I probably can guess at that one that too.

Sure they did… that’s why Vista’s sound changes were so popular, and 3rd party applications just worked

Unfortunately 3rd party applications don’t magically get improved to support new features, they get updated when users complain about stuff being broken.

This means sometimes, things need to be broken to make progress.

[robopensuse]

@Chrysantine

At least they TESTED that most of the functionality worked without you know, skipping sound and other completely useless waste of time that takes away from getting the work done.

They said this is how the new system works, and you must update your software to be compatible with this. 3rd party application vendors, released patches & new versions to support changes…

Not heard ppl moaning about changes in Vista, and application incompatabilities?

[faolan]

Honestly, I don’t see the point behind PulseAudio. Yes, maybe back a couple years ago when the project was started there was some motivation behind creating a universal sound dæmon, but now… no. Why? Because both ALSA and OSS contain sound mixing, which was the whole point in having a sound server.

Here is my beef with sound in Linux: there is too much division and too many layers. The main purpose of PulseAudio has been obsoleted, and in many ways ALSA itself has been obsoleted in functionality by OSS when you look at raw features.

My solution to fix sound in Linux would be simple to go back to using OSS in Linux and if the kernel will not welcome them back even though they opened up their source under the GPL, then some major distro should step up and give equal it equal support. The only two things right now that OSS is really missing from it truly surpassing ALSA is support for suspend / hibernation and for MIDI support – both of which are being worked on right now and will be implemented in OSSv5. Other than that, OSS not only beats out ALSA but can also emulate it!

All that is needed now is for someone with the balls to step up and say: “We are going to support OSS in our distro and make it easy at install time to set up”. So far the only people to do this “right” has Archlinux. But, to be fair Arch is a ground up DIY distro, so installing take a lot more experience than OpenSuSE.

I don’t think it would be too hard to implement this in YAST if we could include OSS as an installation option. I mean, you would just add an extra page in the “Custom Installation” options of the installer and BAM. The problem is now more than likely if you tried to set up OSS, my guess is both because of YAST and because of the package manager you would have a real fun time with all those applications wanting a false dependency of PulseAudio or alsa-base.

The solution is definitely here, but I don’t think it is PulseAudio. Pulse just adds complexity and as in general a waste of system resources, especially on smaller machines.

[Chrysantine]

@robopensuse

Not heard ppl moaning about changes in Vista, and application incompatabilities?

Drivers needed to be updated, not software itself.

You can test it yourself if you wish, grab a non-updated-for-Vista software like Winamp 2.95 and test it yourself. Works fine - allows per-application sound adjustments on software that are several years old, even Dungeon Keeper 2 worked and that’s a Win 95-98 era game for petes sake.

[deanjo13]

There you go again Chrysantine trying to use logic where “OMG but it’s FOSS!” fanboi blinds are in play. Tsk, tsk.

[oldcpu]

@oldcpu

This is definitely worth looking into to find the exact state.

On my sandbox PC which is running a 32-bit 11.2 RC1 I noted sound “just worked” but I did not run any diagnostic scripts to see the exact configuration. I do vaguely recall noting that pulse was disabled, and I have a suspicion that pulse may be installed by default in openSUSE-11.2, but may also be disabled by default on openSUSE-11.2 for some ( all ? ) hardware.

I installed openSUSE-11.2 RC2 KDE-4.3.1 on my sandbox PC (replacing RC1) as a clean install.

As part of the sound installation information provided by the openSUSE installer, it made it quite clear to me that on my sandbox PC that “pulse audio” was disabled in the install ! After the successful install (where sound “just worked” ) I ran the script /usr/sbin/alsa-info-sh and there was no indication of pulse running with sound. Now I note I kept my /home from previous openSUSE-11.2 milestone/RC1 releases, and my media players did have “alsa api” selected from before (as opposed to pulse) so that may cloud the assessment a bit.

But based on the above, it does make me think that it is possible for some PCs, pulse audio is disabled upon installation in 11.2 (my PC is an old 32-bit athlon-1100).

[j_xavier]

according to oldcpu’s post pulseaudio is is not a part of the default 11.2 install, which will prevent a lot of sound issues for everyone. Personally i think that is a wise decision, thou i don’t consider myself adequately savy to give an informed opinion.

the other half of the coin is just as interesting, if you update an existing 11.1 machine with pulseaudio, it appears that a package rtkit is pulled as a dependency to give pulse highpriority/rt scheduling as required. This appears to be ineffectual unless the kernel is patched for it (i’m assuming the current kernel for 11.2 is not, based on the error msgs in syslog).

seems opensuse is not the only one:

Bug #452458 in pulseaudio (Ubuntu): “Add rtkit Conflicts to force removal of … - OS

[LAD] [ANNOUNCE] Safe real-time on the desktop by default; Desktop/audio RT developers, read this! [LWN.net]](http://lwn.net/Articles/339326/)

all this seems to be because of drivers that were written a long time ago that are incompatible with pulseaudio, and everyone is trying to “workaround”.

the term “fubar” seems to apply…

my two cents.