Can pulseaudio be gotten rid of?? Karmic...

[Mark Greenwood]

On Monday 26 Oct 2009 09:32:56 Brian Norman Wootton wrote:
> I wish to rid my install of pulseaudio. I thought I had it licked, but
> ....
> until all the bugs are worked out?? 

Yeah, like that'll ever happen.. </cynic>

FWIW I really love Pulseaudio but recently it's been just awful. But I have to say that in other distros it works very well. I don't mean to have a go at Ubuntu's audio guys - a lot of the problems with Pulse in Ubuntu arise from the bizarre kernel configuration that Ubuntu seems to use. (250Hz timers when it should be 1000Hz, no pre-empt, etc). I build my own kernels and Pulseaudio works extremely well for me.. except in Jaunty, the version they include there is simply a broken version. KDE doesn't play all that well with it either, but that is Phonon's fault. Kubuntu is also not configured very well for pulse, you need to give it realtime permissions which you can do using the Policykit entry in the KDE System Settings. Why this isn't enabled by default I will never know.

I'm sure pulseaudio is not installed by default in Kubuntu. It can however get pulled in as a dependency if you choose to install certain gnome apps. Having libpulse installed on its own will not make pulseaudio start. You are only running pulseaudio if you install the 'pulseaudio' package'. If you have this installed and you really don't want it to start, just remove /etc/X11/Xsession.d/70pulseaudio. Or modify it so it doesn't get re-installed on a future update.

>I get the same black bottom right pop-up every time 
> I boot up which states the alsa driver does not work and the OS is 
> defaulting to pulse audio. 

That'll be because Pulseaudio has stolen the alsa driver. You either need to have everything using pulse or nothing using pulse. Mplayer can use it too - you need to configure your .asoundrc file to default to pulse, and then every native alsa application can play via pulseaudio - including Mplayer and Flash. See the pulseaudio website for more details. Again, this is something that really ought to happen by default, as it does in several other distros where pulseaudio is much better integrated.

Mark

> So on my machine(jaunty amd64) I have mplayer
> using alsa permanently, amarok and skype using pulse audio - I need 
> both drivers. 
>  I might add that kplayer(front end to mplayer) bombs out to the crash 
> handler every time I quit it.
> I have reported this to sourceforge but have heard nothing so far.
> brian
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