2009/10/20 Daniel Chen <seven.steps at gmail.com>: > On Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 3:20 PM, Jeremy Nickurak > <pulseaudio-discuss at trk.nickurak.ca> wrote: >> Maybe the distributions broke it, and have never really fixed it (Ubuntu >> certainly isn't following the "Perfect Setup" advice, even in karmic AFAICT. >> Audio goes to pulse if and only if it the app expressly requests a >> connection to the pulseaudio daemon, which of course causes problems) > > While Ubuntu has done really bad things[0], Luke and I really don't > intentionally break anyone's audio. In fact, since Jaunty/9.04, all > audio in Ubuntu is routed through PulseAudio (in Ubuntu, cf. > /usr/share/alsa/pulse*). (The bits were there for Intrepid/8.10, but > the integration arguably was shabby.) > > The complication is that certain Ubuntu derivatives (e.g., Xubuntu, > Kubuntu) don't ship PulseAudio, so configuring all the backends to use > PulseAudio would cause further integration issues. It's not an ideal > situation by any stretch. It would be interesting to see: * which distributions people are having issues with; * which sound cards and alsa drivers people are having issues with; * which version of alsa, linux-kernel and pulseaudiio they are using (plus any other relevant systems); * which programs are playing up and in what configurations; * what usage patterns are causing issues. For the record, sound was for me on Ubuntu 9.04, but I kept experiencing intermittent sound glitches/periods of silence. This is using the snd-hda-intel driver on a HP Pavillion dv9000. I can't confirm it working on current 9.10 as I switched to OSS4 and the upgrade broke everything (reinstalling alsa worked; not tried PA yet). I suspect that the issues may have been made worse as a result of intensive/demanding computer use (e.g. listening to music while compiling and browsing the web). This may be better in 9.10 (it is definitely a lot snappier) with the use of Con Colvas' scheduler, IIUC. When I get around to re-installing 9.10 (probably some time after release), I will post my experiences here and coordinate with upstream packages and Ubuntu to help resolve the issues (if there are any), without doing a knee-jerk "remove pulseaudio" reaction. - Reece
