F10 on Asus N10J netbook

[David A. De Graaf]

On Mon, Nov 17, 2008 at 06:11:04PM -0700, Michal Jaegermann wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 17, 2008 at 05:27:03PM -0500, David A. De Graaf wrote:
> 
> > Pulseaudio is a travesty and abomination.
> 
> That sounds a bit too overgeneralized; 

Michal Jaegermann:

Thank you for your calming, rational and helpful reply.
My previous rant against pulseaudio was misdirected. 

Pulseaudio works perfectly well - there is no need to remove the
alsa-plugins-pulseaudio package - but the "security" restrictions
surrounding it are onerous and inappropriate for the default setup (in my
opinion).  Overcoming these restrictions is obscure and unnecessesarily
difficult and is likely to discourage Fedora users who are unwilling
to discover the secret handshake.  This default configuration is
inappropriate.  It can and should be made more user-friendly.

My minimal expectations are simple:

1)  aplay should be able to make a sound before anyone has logged in.

2)  sound should be available to all users both at a console
and in X - xfce, gnome, kde or any other graphical environment.
This includes allowing crontab entries to make sounds, regardless of
who's logged in. 
Availability of sound should most certainly not depend on X.

This implies that the pulseaudio daemon must be started at bootup,
preferably as a regular system service, and that the sound device files
should be accessible by anyone.

Here are the changes needed for sound to work for me.

First, make sure the soundcard works.  In most cases, the proper
driver module will be installed automatically.  But for my Asus N10JA2
netbook with Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family)
High Definition Audio Controller (rev 02) it was necessary to add this
line to /etc/modprobe.conf:

    options snd-hda-intel model=3stack-dig


1)  Edit /etc/group, adding every user to group pulse-access, or at
least every user that will be permitted to enjoy the sound system.
Be sure to include root.
    pulse-access:x:495:root,dad,srd

2)  To relax the restrictions that block users from using the sound
system, create a new file, /etc/security/console.perms.d/80-sound.perms

    # define the sound device class
    <sound>=/dev/snd/*
    # permissions
    <console>  0666 <sound>    0666

This allows the sound devices to be accessible to all users.

3)  Start a system-wide pulseaudio daemon by adding lines to
/etc/rc.d/rc.local.  The daemon starts before anyone has logged in,
and runs forever.

    /usr/bin/pulseaudio -D --system --log-level=3 --log-target=syslog
    /usr/bin/aplay /usr/share/sounds/startup3.wav

4)  Prevent xfce from starting another redundant pulseaudio process.
Edit /etc/xdg/xfce4/xinitrc to comment out these lines:

    ##  if test x"`which pulseaudio 2>/dev/null`" != x""; then
    ##         pulseaudio -D &
    ##  fi


If anyone can explain why this is not an appropriate default setup for
Fedora, I would love to hear it.


-- 
	David A. De Graaf    DATIX, Inc.    Hendersonville, NC
	dad at datix.us         www.datix.us