Since I am about to upgrade to SuSE 10.0, I would like to know how the new sound server --whatever it is-- handles 32-bit applications. Currently, in my 9.3, 32-bit applications (Java, Realplayer, and Flashplayer) "monopolize" the sound card. artsdsp, however, works very well with skype (which is 32-bit and not open source and only knows about /dev/dsp) in my 9.3. Sound mixing in 64-bit SuSE has been the only major headache for me. I posted several times a few months ago. I tried shutting down arts and hacking with the ~/.asoundrc file, but I had no luck; those 32-bit applications still want to monopolize my sound card. (My system is a Compaq Presario 3240 laptop with the nVidia chipset and graphics.) ALSA's documetnation for 64 bits is not so good. CF Andreas Jaeger wrote:
At the time of 9.3, arts was the only solution to handle such stuff. It takes some time to come up with an alternative and integrate it. The KDE folks (the upstream maintainers!) were not ready for this with KDE 3.4 which we delivered on 9.3. With 10.0 we moved away from arts, backporting the new KDE framework (sorry, don't remember the name).
SUSE Linux 10.0 ;-)
Andreas