Re: [gentoo-user] Gnome without PulseAudio?

[Canek Peláez Valdés]

On Tue, Apr 10, 2012 at 10:12 PM, Alex Schuster <wonko@×××××××××.org> wrote:
> Canek Peláez Valdés writes:
>
>> On Tue, Apr 10, 2012 at 9:28 PM, Alex Schuster <wonko@×××××××××.org> wrote:
>
>>> Recently, PulseAudio got installed. Seems like gnome-settings-daemon
>>> version 3 no longer has the pulseaudio use flag, so it wants pulseaudio,
>>> which needs alsa-plugins built with the pulseaudio use flag. I wouldn't
>>> mind using PulseAudio, but ist starts automatically when I play movies,
>>> and I get no sound output in mplayer or VLC. And there are weird side
>>> effects, sometimes playback stops, I have to make it run again by
>>> skipping back and forward. Sometimes videos play much faster than normal.
>>
>> Is MPlayer using PulseAudio? Maybe if it did, the problem would go
>> away; I have this in my ~/.mplayer/config:
>>
>> ao=pulse
>> For sure, VLC has an option to use PA by default also.
>
> Oh, I think it does, but there was no sound output. Sorry for not
> mentioning this. I had to switch manually to another sound device, HDA
> ATI something, I cannot look now because I am not near my desktop PC.
>
> If it would just work, then I could make my players use it if they don't
> already. But what about old applications like Quake3, will they still work?

Of course. I have been using PulseAudio since it became stable in
Gentoo (circa October 2010); in my experience, making everything sound
related going through PulseAudio makes everything work. Most modern
applications support directly PulseAudio; for the old ones that don't,
you can make all ALSA sound go through PulseAudio like this:

# cat /etc/asound.conf
pcm.!default {
    type pulse
}

ctl.!default {
    type pulse
}

(If you want it for all users; for your user only, use $HOME/.asoundrc).

>
>>> So I would like to get rid of it. Is this possible? I don't really use
>>> Gnome, but I like to have it to see how it develops. And I wouldn't like
>>> to remove it just because of a sound problem.
>>
>> GNOME 3 depends (strongly, I think) on PulseAudio; you don't say which
>> version of GNOME are you using, but in GNOME 2 PA was optional.
>
> GNOME 3. I don't use it, but I wanted to look a little into its desktop
> philosophy.

But do you use gnome-session? If you are not using gnome-session, I
don't think you can see that much of its desktop philosophy.

>>> Maybe the PulseAudio problem is the same as I had with ALSA, I have two
>>> internal cards, and I had to tell ALSA not to prefer the SPDIF one.
>>> Maybe I have to do the same with PulseAudio, but I do not know how.
>>
>> Try media-sound/pavucontrol; you can select which card the sounds goes
>> through, and which output to use (HDMI, for example).
>
> Thanks, I just installed it. It shows the HDMI device on top, and only
> this on has the green checkbox enabled. Maybe simply activating the
> analog port will make it run. I'll see this in a week days when I'm back
> at my PC.
>
>>> And
>>> the weird playback effects are spooky, I'd prefer to keep things as they
>>> are, at the moment I'm happy with plain ALSA.
>>
>> I don't think it is possible to uninstall completely PA in GNOME 3; I
>> remember it was possible in GNOME 2.
>
> It got installed when I emerged GNOME 3, but until end of march
> alsa-plugins was not installed. Then pulseaudio went from 1.1-r1 to
> 1.99.2, since then it needs the alsa-plugins package, and my trouble
> started.

Mmmh? I have the latest GNOME 3.2, and I'm still using
media-sound/pulseaudio-1.1-r1. Perhaps you used autounmask? I would
try to go back to 1.1-r1; it's stable, after all, and GNOME doesn't
need the bleeding edge on PulseAudio.

>>> And what is starting the pulseaudio process? I can kill it, but it comes
>>> back the next time I run mplayer. Is there a way to just disable it?
>>
>> If I recall correctly, the GNOME session manager will keep starting PA
>> if the daemon dies.
>
> Maybe I had a GNOME session running in parallel? I don't think so, but
> I'm not sure.

If you are trying to use any GNOME core technology (like GNOME Shell),
it will for sure start automatically gnome-session, I think. Some
applications can run without it, but many will try to connect to some
desktop session, and maybe some will actually start it. GNOME session
then will keep starting PulseAudio.

I don't understand how do you not use GNOME 3, but you want to see its
desktop philosophy. Do you run KDE or XFCE, and try to run the shell
on top of that?

Regards.
-- 
Canek Peláez Valdés
Posgrado en Ciencia e Ingeniería de la Computación
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México