Pulse according to its documentation wasn't supposed to do this. Thanks much for this information, I just couldn't figure out what to do about those alsa errors on login.On Wed, 16 May 2012, Martin McCormick wrote: > I have had a Pentium 3 system for about a year and have > been trying to get it to run some form of linux such as ubuntu > or the latest version of Debian. It has been a battle from the > get go. I haven't fixed the problem, but I finally found out > what caused it. > > This system has a Dell ICH5 sound card and the chips on > the mother board are about 2004 vintage with a 2.7 GHZ > processor. > > The Debian testing distribution AKA wheezy is the first > kernel to have speakup built in and I am happy to say it talks > like it is supposed to. > > After installing wheezy with speakup, I noticed the > system had tons of errors relating to alsa each time it came up. > Also, if you tried to aplay, arecord or use mplayer on a file, > really bad things always happened such as a spew of alsa-related > errors stating the configuration file was corrupt topped off by > loss of speakup again. > > I recently discovered, however, that if one was root, > mplayer and aplay worked fine while speakup continued to work. > > This made me curious as to why root could use audio but > users couldn't and it wasn't a permission problem. > > It seems that pulseaudio's daemon places a directory > called .pulse in all users' directories. It populates .pulse > with about 5 binary files dealing with pulseaudio configuration. > > On my system, something is terribly wrong with > pulseaudio as the configuration files in .pulse poison any > alsa-related tasks. > > Amixer, aplay and arecord all cause the spew of errors > and no sound as well as no speakup afterward. If I remove the > .pulse directory or those configuration files, audio works fine > again. > > In a short time, pulseaudio restores .pulse to its > poisonous configuration and we are back to square 1 again. > > For now, I installed pulseaudio's local configuration > file known as client.conf in .pulse and told it not to autospawn > which is one of the directives you can set. > > This seems to have stopped pulseaudio from re-building > .pulse each time so I can use the command line and play audio > but pulseaudio should be able to run using those configuration > files and I believe that speech under gnome requires pulse so > this is just a stop-gap measure until pulseaudio gets fixed. > > I think this bug has been around for awhile and may be > due to pulseaudio not being able to handle that ich5 sound card > otherwise everybody would not be able to use pulse. > > I admit I do not yet know much about pulseaudio and what > it does but this discovery probably explains a good deal of why > vinux, ubuntu and other recent linuxen haven't worked well on > some systems regarding speech and sound. > > On the system in question, ubuntu9.10 would talk a > little in gnome and then crash suddenly anywhere from a minute > or so to maybe a few hours of operation. > > Ubuntu 10.x up to 12 and Vinux have yet to make a sound > and I bet anything it is the pulseaudio situation. I imagine > that if you have a sound card that pulse knows or likes better, > everything is fine. I am posting this to see if anybody else can > shed any more light or explain more what pulse does besides > thoroughly trash the system's audio. It looks like it can be a > very useful system when it works right. > > Martin McCormick > > _______________________________________________ > Blinux-list mailing list > Blinux-list@xxxxxxxxxx > https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list > > ---------------------------------------------------------------- Jude <jdashiel-at-shellworld-dot-net> <http://www.shellworld.net/~jdashiel/nj.html> _______________________________________________ Blinux-list mailing list Blinux-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list