Fedora sound nightmare (Pulseaudio)

[Dimi Paun]

On Fri, 2008-03-14 at 17:15 +0000, Bastien Nocera wrote:
> You can also right-click on the output device in the "output device"
> tab, and select one of those as the default. There's no need to move
> each stream by hand to another device...

I know, I tried that (as suggested by you and Lennart), and it doesn't
seem to work. I did:
  * mark ALSA as default
  * play sound in RhythmBox, sound goes to USB
  * move RhythmBox stream to ALSA manually, works
  * play test sound from Sound Preferences applet (set to Autodetect)
    sound goes to USB
  * move it manually to ALSA, works

Anyway, I do appreciate the help I received on the issue, now at
least I can hear something. Big part of the problem was that the
pa* utilities where not present on my box, my yum-based searches
for them yielded nothing, and so I sort of had my eyes and hands
tied in a way. 

> In that case, step away from the computer. Computers frustrate
> everyone,

This misses the point I think. It's not like I exploded out of
nothing, as I explained, for the last 3 years sound on my fedora
based boxes was on and off every few days. That's extreme.

And most importantly, we haven't reached any conclusion on why
my stable F8 setup got suddenly broken. And no, this time around
it wasn't the kernel, or ALSA, or SELinux. Things just stopped
working on a stable and mature (by Fedora's standards) version.

This is a big problem for Fedora: my wife (a non-technical user),
runs Fedora on her ThinkPad X60. A few days ago she applies some
updates, and reboots. She calls me really upset that nothing
seemed to work: she no longer had a window manager! Yes, metacity
did not start all of a sudden, for unknown reason. 

Now, I hope you can appreciate what a non-technical user feels
when there's no window manager all of a sudden. Nothing works!
File a bug? How? This is close to having a kernel that doesn't
boot all of a sudden. After much googling, she figure out that
she had to manually start metacity from the command line, then
do I-don't-know-what for it to start next reboot. Why? Is this
normal to expect on a stable Fedora release?!?

And to top it off, her beloved Desktop Effects no longer work.
I asked her to file a bug report, but she didn't really wanted
because when she did that in the past nothing came out of it,
and she felt people were a tad mean to her...

-- 
Dimi Paun <dimi at lattica.com>
Lattica, Inc.