https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=804297 https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=804297#c0 Summary: More control over PulseAudio is necessary Classification: openSUSE Product: openSUSE 12.3 Version: RC 1 Platform: All OS/Version: openSUSE 12.2 Status: NEW Severity: Enhancement Priority: P5 - None Component: Sound AssignedTo: tiwai@suse.com ReportedBy: daniel.mantione@freepascal.org QAContact: qa-bugs@suse.de Found By: --- Blocker: --- User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:18.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/18.0 Nowadays PulseAudio is the default sound system in OpenSuSE. I can understand the reasons. Nevertheless it causes me nothing but trouble. Three examples: 1. My laptop. Onboard Intel HD Audio. Pulseaudio works, but at some point loading the Pulseaudio X11 module started to take tens of seconds, severely delaying the login process. After serious debugging, this is still unexplained. 2. My office PC desktop. ATi Azalia onboard audio. Just upgraded from OpenSuSE 11.2 to 12.2. Alsa sound working fine, no sound with PulseAudio. Already spent 1,5 days of troubleshooting, my boss starts to question why it is so difficult in Linux. 3. My desktop PC. Soundblaster Audigy. Pulseaudio abstracts away all features of the soundcard. Therefore I uninstalled Pulseaudio. It's my only computer with flawless audio support. So while being a technically solid sound system, it causes quite a bit of grief in real world situations. I am an advanced Linux user and can troubleshoot a few things. Less experienced users might be stuck with a computer without sound. 3 out of 3 failures would be enough to call for removal of PulseAudio. I won't do that, rather I look a bit more at the core of the problem. PulseAudio is a complex application with complex configuration files. Upon first startup it also creates a quite a bit of state in .pulse. This determines the behaviour of the audio server. If PulseAudio somehow decides for example to use a null audio sink at first started (sound card unavailable?), it won't automatically switch to ALSA audio sink again without manual intervention. OpenSuSE provides no user friendly way to retrieve what PulseAudio is doing. If it is using the wrong audio sink, the has to discover this himself with command line tools, and finding out which command tools are available and how to use them can a laborious process. The same is true for the configuration files. In other words to make Pulseaudio integration a success in OpenSuSE, it must become easy to see what Pulseaudio is doing (for the audio sink in use), and to do interventions into this from the GUI. This could for example be integrated into YaST, which currently just deals with the ALSA configuration. Lastly I would prefer control over the sound system used when installing OpenSuSE. For example the situation on my desktop, which has an advanced sound card, where Pulseaudio abstracts away much functionality, is a situation where one, for the time being, doesn't want Pulseaudio installed at all. Just like being able to configure a desktop environment, or be able to choose between boot managers, it would be very usefull to choose between the sound system, with at least the following list of choices: * Bare ALSA * ALSA with Dmix configured * ALSA with Pulseaudio on top The "ALSA with Pulseaudio" on top can then be the default, though if an advanced sound card with hardware mixing is present, it could be considered to automatically select the "Bare ALSA" option. The availability of such an option during installation would remove the need to do error-prone interventions into the system after it is installed and could therefore severely reduce the bad experiences with systems that have sound issues after installation. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: Not relevant Actual Results: Not relevant Expected Results: Not relevant -- Configure bugmail: https://bugzilla.novell.com/userprefs.cgi?tab=email ------- You are receiving this mail because: ------- You are on the CC list for the bug.