Pulseaudio and What I Found

Martin McCormick martin at x.it.okstate.edu
Wed May 16 17:12:54 UTC 2012


	I have had a Pentium 3 system for about a year and have
been trying to get it to run some form of linux such as ubuntu
or the latest version of Debian. It has been a battle from the
get go. I haven't fixed the problem, but I finally found out
what caused it.

	This system has a Dell ICH5 sound card and the chips on
the mother board are about 2004 vintage with a 2.7 GHZ
processor.

	The Debian testing distribution AKA wheezy is the first
kernel to have speakup built in and I am happy to say it talks
like it is supposed to.

	After installing wheezy with speakup, I noticed the
system had tons of errors relating to alsa each time it came up.
Also, if you tried to aplay, arecord or use mplayer on a file,
really bad things always happened such as a spew of alsa-related
errors stating the configuration file was corrupt topped off by
loss of speakup again.

	I recently discovered, however, that if one was root,
mplayer and aplay worked fine while speakup continued to work.

	This made me curious as to why root could use audio but
users couldn't and it wasn't a permission problem.

	It seems that pulseaudio's daemon places a directory
called .pulse in all users' directories. It populates .pulse
with about 5 binary files dealing with pulseaudio configuration.

	On my system, something is terribly wrong with
pulseaudio as the configuration files in .pulse poison any
alsa-related tasks.

	Amixer, aplay and arecord all cause the spew of errors
and no sound as well as no speakup afterward. If I remove the
.pulse directory or those configuration files, audio works fine
again.

	In a short time, pulseaudio restores .pulse to its
poisonous configuration and we are back to square 1 again.

	For now, I installed pulseaudio's local configuration
file known as client.conf in .pulse and told it not to autospawn
which is one of the directives you can set.

	This seems to have stopped pulseaudio from re-building
.pulse each time so I can use the command line and play audio
but pulseaudio should be able to run using those configuration
files and I believe that speech under gnome requires pulse so
this is just a stop-gap measure until pulseaudio gets fixed.

	I think this bug has been around for awhile and may be
due to pulseaudio not being able to handle that ich5 sound card
otherwise everybody would not be able to use pulse.

	I admit I do not yet know much about pulseaudio and what
it does but this discovery probably explains a good deal of why
vinux, ubuntu and other recent linuxen haven't worked well on
some systems regarding speech and sound.

	On the system in question, ubuntu9.10 would talk a
little in gnome and then crash suddenly anywhere from a minute
or so to maybe a few hours of operation.

	Ubuntu 10.x up to 12 and Vinux have yet to make a sound
and I bet anything it is the pulseaudio situation. I imagine
that if you have a sound card that pulse knows or likes better,
everything is fine. I am posting this to see if anybody else can
shed any more light or explain more what pulse does besides
thoroughly trash the system's audio. It looks like it can be a
very useful system when it works right.

Martin McCormick




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