Greetings. On debian stable, I tried: prompt> aptitude why pulseaudio i gnome-orca Depends speech-dispatcher i A speech-dispatcher Recommends pulseaudio prompt> aptitude why speech-dispatcher i gnome-orca Depends speech-dispatcher Unfortunately, although speech-dispatcher only "Recommends" pulseaudio, it refuses to install unless pulseaudio is present. Is this a bug? speech-dispatcher used to work before pulseaudio... So, as I don't use gnome-orca or speech-dispatcher, I did: # aptitude remove speech-dispatcher pulseaudio gnome-orca This also removed lots of things like liblouis2, which I also don't use but I don't see why louis should depend on pulseaudio ... So now things work, but there are lots of spurious error messages like prompt> echo gloop | espeak ALSA lib pcm.c:2217:(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM cards.pcm.rear ALSA lib pcm.c:2217:(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM cards.pcm.center_lfe ALSA lib pcm.c:2217:(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM cards.pcm.side ALSA lib pulse.c:243:(pulse_connect) PulseAudio: Unable to connect: Connection refused ALSA lib pulse.c:243:(pulse_connect) PulseAudio: Unable to connect: Connection refused ALSA lib pcm_dmix.c:957:(snd_pcm_dmix_open) The dmix plugin supports only playback stream Is this a bug? ALSA used to work before pulseaudio... Gnome seems to me more and more like windoze: totalitarian, and destroying everything but itself. Perhaps good intentions aren't everything. Anyway, aptitude remove pulseaudio is not as brutal as cd /usr/bin; rm -f pulseaudio ; touch pulseaudio ; chmod 555 pulseaudio and it does work; but not as cleanly as I hoped. Peter Billam http://www.pjb.com.au pj at pjb.com.au (03) 6278 9410 "Follow the charge, not the particle." -- Richard Feynman from The Theory of Positrons, Physical Review, 1949
