Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-packaging (139 mails)

[Wade Berrier <wberrier@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 2008-03-12 at 23:51 +0100, Christian Morales Vega wrote:
> 2008/3/12, Wade Berrier:
> > 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 :)
> You can't use the software mixing argument. dmix *works*, perhaps
> doesn't works in all cases, but works. You have a sound card where
> dmix doesn't works (isn't being used?) and PulseAudio mixing does?
> Fine. But can you say for sure that PulseAudio mixing works for
> *everybody*? Because a single user for which PulseAudio mixing doesn't
> works and dmix works is enough to invalidate this argument.

You're right... it's not a differentiating argument, but it is another
available solution.

> (You are a Novell employer? So just search Takashi Iwai in the
> building and he will fix your dmix problem for a free breakfast ;-)

Heh, unfortunately he's probably in Germany, and I'm in Provo.  But I
wouldn't mind buying breakfast for him some time as he's fixed several
other issues with some of my sound cards.

> I'm not against PulseAudio. But before patching packages like general
> rule we should know the KDE Team posture about it. If it still is the
> "it's just a Gnome thing" from
> http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-factory/2007-11/msg00175.html the
> only packages that should be touched are the ones that the Gnome Team
> is already touching:
> http://en.opensuse.org/GNOME/Ideas/11.0/PulseAudio

Thanks for the links!  I didn't know these existed...

Wade