Re: [gentoo-user] Gnome without PulseAudio?

[Alex Schuster]

Canek Peláez Valdés writes:

> On Tue, Apr 10, 2012 at 10:12 PM, Alex Schuster <wonko@×××××××××.org> wrote:
>> Canek Peláez Valdés writes:

>> 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).

Sounds good, thanks. Then it may be easier to just use PulseAudio now,
instead of prolongating the inevitable.

And Alecks' Link shows even this is no longer necessara. GuessI only
have to switch the audio devices (HDMI and analog).

>>> 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.

You're right! I'm on ~amd64, so 1.99.2 is current for me, but I can mask
it. This would work for the moment at least, and I can try PulseAudio
when I have some more time for that.


> 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?

I don't regularly use GNOME 3, but sometimes I start a GNOME session
from KDE, in parallel on another display. I'm interested in how desktop
philosophies evolve, and so I emerged GNOME 3 recently.

I also have another session open with a simple window manager like
Enlightenment 0.16, where I start full-screen OpenGL applications... um,
games. They tend to sometimes distort the layout of windows in KDE, so I
no longer start them from KDE. That's just one of the many things that
do not work well with KDE :(  For years I wonder why I still use it, but
I keep hoping that finally it will become stable.

	Wonko