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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