F10 and Pulseaudio

Bill Davidsen davidsen at tmr.com
Tue Dec 9 17:46:55 UTC 2008


Niels Weber wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> what is the state of Pulseaudio in F10?
> 
It works out of the box on over the half the installs as long as you have a 
single well known soundcard. The documentation is incomplete, there are a number 
of mixers and switches which interact in poorly-defined ways, and the 
interaction between alsa and PA is somewhat hardware dependent.

If you are a guru able to figure it out from the source code and really need to 
mix multiple sources, it works well.

> On my previous installation (F8) I disabled PA after a short test as
> there where to many problems with it. On my fresh install of F10 I
> have it currently enabled, thinking that it should be more mature by
> now.
> 
You probably want to take it out totally if you disable it.

> At first it had the wrong soundcard as a default device, this was
> easily changed and is no real bug (although perhaps the installer
> should ask which soundcard should be used if there is more than one).
> Rhythmbox and mplayer now have sound (but only stereo instead of 5.1
> it seems), so that's fine.
> 
Yes, the nice driver GUI which left you select the mode is long gone. I had it 
in FC[456] and not since. I saw a post saying you can still do that, but it 
notably omitted any hint how, or pointer to human readable documentation.

> All games have no sound though, even those installed from the Fedora
> repository (for example "Battle for Wesnoth").
> 
Fedora is for serious uses, you should be doing software development and running 
servers.  ;-)

> I can understand if third-party software still has problems with PA,
> but shouldn't at least the games that are shipped with the
> distribution work with the default sound setup?
> 
IMHO PulseAudio is a poorly documented and overly complex solution to problems 
most users don't have. It never should have been made a default, because it 
doesn't work for a large number of users who have more than the absolute lowest 
level sound hardware and less than the highest level of sound expertise.

> How to fix this? Uninstall PA again?
> 
That worked in FC9, I tried it in F10 and alsa sound stopped working as well, so 
I don't have a solution. I still have one FC6 machine I use for sound, does all 
the channels, multiple inputs, can use the external speakers in the other 
room... and I wouldn't upgrade it for anything!

-- 
Bill Davidsen <davidsen at tmr.com>
   "We have more to fear from the bungling of the incompetent than from
the machinations of the wicked."  - from Slashdot




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