Two problems in f9 - pulseaudio and kde4 - need suggestions
William W. Austin
waustin at speakeasy.net
Sun Oct 12 06:01:00 UTC 2008
I have been running linux since at least before rh5.0, and have built
and maintained many machines (both personal and professional -
including some fairly sophisticated networked machines) for a
long time. But now I have hit two problems which have me stumped.
The first is a set of problems with pulseaudio. On my favorite
workstation, a 64-bit machine with a dual-core cpu, I have both a SB
Audigy 2 (350) and sound on the mb 8-channel real-tek.
Prior to f9, I have been running both for years without any problems.
The Audigy has been driving a 5+1 speaker system while the other was
used to pipe output from a speech synthesizer to a different set of
speakers. Until f9 and pulseaudio this worked without a whimper.
I have now spent about 2 weeks reading everything I could find about
pulseaudio and am beginning to be convinced that either (a) the system
is inherently not usable for my setup, or (b) someone hosed up the
implementation used in f9. From reading the problems in bugzilla -
especially the ones close as 'not a bug,' I have become convinced that
my only alternatives are to go back down to f8 OR to remove all
pulseaudio components from my system and figure out how to wing it from
there.
If anyone has a working pulseaudio configuration which successfully
drives the Audigy 2 in 5+1 mode, I would love to see it. Even with
that I could probably move the speech synthesizer apps to another box.
The other item which has me puzzled and less than happy is kde4. It
seems seriously "dumbed down" compared to kde3. Several configuration
items are either absent or so well hidden that they might as well be.
In particular, having the menu systems pinned (a la windoze) to a spot
on a panel rather than being able to assign them to mouse clicks
anywhere on the screen is a real drag. And then there is the inability
to add apps to panel itself - a serious lack for my purposes. Either it
was someone's intention to dumb down kde4 the way that gnome has been
so that more technical users have to give up and go elsewhere OR a good
deal of the "configurability" which was present in kde3 is simply not
ready yet for kde4. (yes, I *have* edited my menus - that's not an
issue.)
I would simply remove kde4 and go back to kde3, but I have already
tried that once, but it was not successful as (at least) a few other
apps seem to depend on kde4's presence, so I had to reinstall it.
On this issue, it's possible that I have missed something, and if so
someone please clue me in (I have RTFM'ed AND RTFsourceCode + web
searched so much that my eyes are beginning to rebel).
Any suggestions on either of these two points would be VERY greatly
appreciated. OTOH I'll probably wake up tomorrow with solutions to all
of the above and will feel really stoopid for sending this email.
Thanks,
--
william w. austin waustin at speakeasy.net
"life is just another phase i'm going through. this time, anyway ..."
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