Proper PulseAudio installation for KUbuntu 10.4 ; jor KUbuntu

Mark Greenwood captain_bodge at yahoo.co.uk
Thu Jun 24 20:45:52 UTC 2010


On Thursday 24 Jun 2010 21:18:13 Reinhold Rumberger wrote:
> On Thursday 24 June 2010, Ric Moore wrote:
> > On Thu, 2010-06-24 at 20:45 +0100, Mark Greenwood wrote:
> > > You'll find it mostly works, but KDE apps will all use ALSA
> > > routing to talk to pulseaudio, or will not produce any audio at
> > > all. This problem is fixed in Maverick, but is unlikely to be
> > > fixed in Lucid.
> > > 
> > > Basically, pulseaudio under Kubuntu 10.04 is not supported, and
> > > does not work properly.
> > 
> > I thought Lucid was LTS?? Why wouldn't it be "fixed"?
> > <sighs> Ric
> 
> Why would they fix something they don't support?
> 
>   --Reinhold
> 
> 
As Reinhold says, it's not supported. 

Also the instructions you've found for Skype appear to refer to using it under Gnome (the references to GStreamer confirm this), so you may find them misleading. Your problem with Dragon Player not working could be down to you using the GStreamer backend instead of the Xine backend for Phonon.

> =====  Home page improvements:
> The PA home page would be greatly improved for potential users if
> several items were added to it:
> 1) A few sentences about "what is the purpose of PA?  What uses/needs
> does it fulfull?  For users?  For developers?

Pulseaudio is a sound server. It permits multiple applications to play audio simultaneously. It is a replacement for the esound engine under Gnome. It also provides on-the-fly audio routing per-application, and per-application volume controls, as well as network audio. (As an aside, I love it, it's great).

> 2) Here is the suggested set of sw you should install.

In any up to date distro where it is supported (eg Ubuntu 10.04), it will be preinstalled and preconfigured, as it's pretty much a requirement for Gnome these days. Under KDE there is a feeling that it's not required as KDE has Phonon. In my view (and it seems only the Kubuntu devs disagree with me on this) this is a mistake, as Phonon does not provide half the functionality of pulseaudio.

A lot of work went into KDE over the last 6 months to make it pulseaudio-friendly. However these changes arrived slightly too late for the 10.04 Kubuntu release and there were build issues and packaging problems that would have been too risky to address at the late stage when the problem was identified. Not to mention the fact there appear to be two versions of Phonon upstream. I raised the bug, but I didn't spot it until the 10.04 RC.

Mark




More information about the kubuntu-users mailing list