Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-packaging (139 mails)

[Wade Berrier <wberrier@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

On Wed, 2008-03-12 at 18:07 +0100, Ludwig Nussel wrote:
> Marcus Rueckert wrote:
> > On 2008-03-12 17:45:05 +0100, Christian Morales Vega wrote:
> > > In any case what openSUSE will do is something must be cleared.
> > > For what I understood Gnome is going to use PulseAudio yes or yes.
> > > Upstream will port their apps to PulseAudio and openSUSE can't patch
> > > all of them, correct?
> > > GStreamer, xine... they can't have a default output for KDE and
> > > another one for Gnome. KDE4 will use Phonon, that can use xine or
> > > gstreamer like backend. Will KDE4 apps use PulseAudio when Phonon uses
> > > gstreamer and ALSA directly when Phonon uses xine? In the first case
> > > apps will have *two* per application volume controls (Phonon and
> > > PulseAudio)?
> > > Without a clear path this could be very confusing.
> >
> > ideally pulseaudio and phonon would be just wrapper for that
> > functionally inside alsa.
>
> Quoting the fedora-devel mail:
> > 6. If you have an application that uses ALSA, please make sure that it
> >  doesn't hardcode ALSA driver names (i.e. something like "hw:0"), it
> >  should use  "default" instead, which is now being redirected to
> >  "pulse", our plugin for libasound. Hardcoding ALSA device names
> >  (besides "default") is a bug in your application anyway, so here
> >  you have yet another reason to fix that!
>
> So there is an alsa plugin and if an application normally uses alsa
> it will transparently use pulseaudio. No application change
> required. Sounds sane to me. I wonder whether that also works for
> applications that support surround sound such as quake4 though.

I'm not sure either... but, if it fails, this would be an instance where
the real quake binary could be wrapped in a shell wrapper that also runs
'pasuspender' beforehand so that quake could use the hardware directly.

I brought this up on opensuse-packaging with the hope of preconfiguring
all apps (patching our packages to: create wrappers, modify default
config files, etc... ) so they would work with pulseaudio.

The goal: to be running any desktop environment, start up any
application that uses sound, have sound actually work (even when using a
cheap sound card that does no hardware mixing), and get all the features
of pulseaudio.

(I'm currently using one of those cheap cards, but am almost frustrated
at the point of buying a sound card that can mix 32 streams in hardware
just so I can hear pidgin beeps and hear flash video at the same time :)

Wade