PulseAudio

[Bastien Nocera]

On Tue, 2007-02-27 at 12:23 -0500, David Zeuthen wrote:
> On Tue, 2007-02-27 at 17:06 +0000, Bastien Nocera wrote:
> > I think this is still the best course of action for F7, given some
> > work to 1) make PulseAudio work (as it doesn't right now for the
> > above), 2) some integration with the GNOME sound properties so it
> > spits out the sound events on the right device.
> 
> This needs to work with fast-user-switching and that is *hard* given
> that PA hogs the device (or at least used to) and most ALSA playback
> devices can only have a single opener (no mixing).
> 
> Also, keep in mind that we're going to enable accessible login
> (including screen readers) for gdm - I wonder if we need pulse audio
> running there and how it works with the alsa-pulse plug-in - will
> pulse-audio be activated on demand? Or will the presence of alsa-pulse
> just break accessible login because there's no PA instance running?
> 
> Thanks for looking into this - PA rocks and will make our distro so much
> better. But it needs to work with f-u-s or we need to decide to do pull
> either PA or f-u-s. Simple as that.

Does esound work that way? If it doesn't, then you have the exact same
problem when a user switches on the sound bling in the control-center.

If it does, then what's stopping us from using PA as a drop-in
replacement for esound? It would/should work just as well as esound did
before (apart from the fact that I'm told PA hogs the physical device
instead of going through dmix, which means nothing works unless you have
a PA sink, or use the ALSA plugin for PA).