PulseAudio

[David Zeuthen]

On Tue, 2007-02-27 at 18:15 +0000, Bastien Nocera wrote:
> 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).

What is stopping us is that esound is not used by default and haven't
for a long time. I'm all for PA but we cannot turn it on by default
until it works with f-u-s. Well, we can, but then f-u-s is useless and I
don't think we want to ship useless products...

     David