After management found some loose change down the back of the sofa at the end of the quarter I spent it on some Bluetooth kit including a headset to test the new Bluedevil KDE Bluetooth UI. This morning I got the headset working with KDE SC 4.5. I would like to discuss testing PulseAudio for KDE in openSUSE 11.4. I hope that by then our crash test dummies who are already using PA will have run over all the major, frequent bugs in implementation and deployment for us. The advantage over plain ALSA that appeals to me is allowing the user to do some useful configuration of her audio environment with UI tools, as this covers the (for example) Bluetooth case of configuring music/effects to come out of the speakers while VOIP calls are handled by a headset. I guess you can do that with ALSA but it will probably be a static setup and there is no KDE UI for it. Since KDE SC 4.5 there is a nice UI for configuring PulseAudio's Phonon backend, and KMix supports dynamic PA mixers and application audio streams. When 4.6 is released there will be a speaker setup System Settings module that can let you select audio processing depending on your speaker setup and configure audio profiles for devices. The other reason for embracing PA is that it's not going away from the distribution. At the moment (11.3) we have kept the zombies away from our sound cards on the KDE CD by removing anything that uses it, but this is fragile - most users will soon install other software that pulls in PA as a dependency. By testing out PA now we can help fix bugs in the KDE infrastructure and discover problems with the rest of openSUSE's KDE multimedia stack (eg see how Phonon VLC works with PA. FWIW, the steps I had to take to get the headset working with KDE:Distro:Factory on 11.3 are: (steps we would preconfigure OOTB for 11.4) * install pulseaudio, pulseaudio-module-bluetooth and pulseaudio-module-x11 * register KDE:Unstable:Playground repo * install bluedevil and start it with Service Manager (or relogin) * uninstall kbluetooth (not necessary but removes confusion due to 2 bluetooth icons) * start pulseaudio manually (or relogin) * execute start-bluetooth-x11 and start-bluetooth-kde * from the Bluetooth system tray, Manage Devices... * Put the headset into pairing mode * Add Device and run through the wizard with default settings. * Click 'trust' in the Bluetooth Device Manager. * restart kmix (or relogin) * Play some music * In kmix, open the mixer window and go to playback streams, right click the eg amarok stream and select 'Move' to the headset device. Make sure the stream and the headset playback device are not muted. The last step won't be necessary once we rebuild kdebase4-runtime with PulseAudio support, since then the Phonon KCM allows phonon sound categories to be routed to specific devices. Thoughts? More info and debugging tips at http://pulseaudio.org/wiki/KDE Will -- Will Stephenson, KDE Developer, openSUSE Boosters Team SUSE LINUX Products GmbH - Nürnberg - AG Nürnberg - HRB 16746 - GF: Markus Rex -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-kde+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-kde+help@opensuse.org