[Haifux] Pulseaudio: Sounds good in theory

[Oron Peled]

On Wednesday, 5 בJanuary 2011 11:20:01 Eli Billauer wrote:
> > But I now use Fedora 14, and all the glitches appear to be gone, 
> That tempted me to believe that I can just upgrade pulseaudio and forget 
> all about it.. As a matter of fact, I went for that approach. Time will 
> tell if that was really a quick fix.

You should note that some of the complexity is the result of greater
integration. This is true when we talk about audio which in
my case (Feora-14) invovles ALSA, pulseaudio, Phonon (yes I use KDE)
and the applications themselves (some KDE, some not)

However, you can see the same phenomena in the UI area (X-server,
X-server-drivers, kernel-drivers, desktops [including sometimes
composition managers, OpenGL, besides our loved window
managers)

Example for this integration:
 In another post, you asked about the mixer -- current GNOME
 and KDE mixers show/control the pulseaudio settings (including
 separate volume control for separate applications). However
 Older versions had problems because they "saw" both the
 ALSA hardware control (which only confuse the user, because
 their names vary for every audio-card) and the software
 mixer created by pulseaudio.

This means us normal users (not RH University graduates ;-)
have two options:
 * Becoming [semi)-experts in the (e.g: audio) domain. This has
   a lot of benefits, but not always possible (time limitations)

 * Trust our stack integrators, both upstream and packagers.
   At the same time, try to check them and help them by
   opening bugs, talking with them on mailing lists, IRC etc.

BTW: When pulseaudio entered Fedora it uncovered a *lot*
        of latent bugs in different ALSA drivers. Part of the improvement
        in pulseaudio over the latest release is due to fixing those kernel
        bugs.

> The truth is that the difference between the versions is that FC12 gives 
> you 0.9.21-5, while FC14 gives 0.9.21-7. Pulseaudio itself switched to 
> 0.9.22 only a month ago more or less, so I suppose they take 
> intermediate versions. Anyhow, I downloaded the RPMs intended for Fedora 
> 14 and upgraded with them.

Again, trying to upgrade bits and pieces (with --nodeps?) will no doubt
help you graduate the RH University (unless you drop in the middle)

However, it's not the most effective way to solve your direct problem.
Fedora-12 is EOL for more than a month now -- if you don't want
to upgrade once/twice a year you may have chosen the wrong
distribution for your needs. I use Fedora exactly because of its
bleeding edge policy -- but that's me. I choose other distributions
when I need something with a long release cycle (Centos, Debian stable)

> By the way, my first attempt was to download the sources for 0.9.22, but 
> ./configure failed on some missing dependency. I suppose that only Red 
> Hat University graduates compile from sources nowadays.

The interesting question is *which* dependency?

-- 
Oron Peled                                 Voice: +972-4-8228492
oron at actcom.co.il                  http://users.actcom.co.il/~oron
"Normal people ... believe that if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Engineers believe that if it ain't broke, it doesn't have enough
features ... yet." -- Scott Adams
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