I have been running linux since at least before rh5.0, and have built and maintained many machines (both personal and professional - including some fairly sophisticated networked machines) for a long time. But now I have hit two problems which have me stumped.
The first is a set of problems with pulseaudio. On my favorite workstation, a 64-bit machine with a dual-core cpu, I have both a SB Audigy 2 (350) and sound on the mb 8-channel real-tek.
Prior to f9, I have been running both for years without any problems. The Audigy has been driving a 5+1 speaker system while the other was used to pipe output from a speech synthesizer to a different set of speakers. Until f9 and pulseaudio this worked without a whimper.
I have now spent about 2 weeks reading everything I could find about pulseaudio and am beginning to be convinced that either (a) the system is inherently not usable for my setup, or (b) someone hosed up the implementation used in f9. From reading the problems in bugzilla - especially the ones close as 'not a bug,' I have become convinced that my only alternatives are to go back down to f8 OR to remove all pulseaudio components from my system and figure out how to wing it from there.
If anyone has a working pulseaudio configuration which successfully drives the Audigy 2 in 5+1 mode, I would love to see it. Even with that I could probably move the speech synthesizer apps to another box.
The other item which has me puzzled and less than happy is kde4. It seems seriously "dumbed down" compared to kde3. Several configuration items are either absent or so well hidden that they might as well be. In particular, having the menu systems pinned (a la windoze) to a spot on a panel rather than being able to assign them to mouse clicks anywhere on the screen is a real drag. And then there is the inability to add apps to panel itself - a serious lack for my purposes. Either it was someone's intention to dumb down kde4 the way that gnome has been so that more technical users have to give up and go elsewhere OR a good deal of the "configurability" which was present in kde3 is simply not ready yet for kde4. (yes, I *have* edited my menus - that's not an issue.)
I would simply remove kde4 and go back to kde3, but I have already tried that once, but it was not successful as (at least) a few other apps seem to depend on kde4's presence, so I had to reinstall it.
On this issue, it's possible that I have missed something, and if so someone please clue me in (I have RTFM'ed AND RTFsourceCode + web searched so much that my eyes are beginning to rebel).
Any suggestions on either of these two points would be VERY greatly appreciated. OTOH I'll probably wake up tomorrow with solutions to all of the above and will feel really stoopid for sending this email.
Thanks,
Around 07:01am on Sunday, October 12, 2008 (UK time), William W. Austin scrawled:
anywhere on the screen is a real drag. And then there is the inability to add apps to panel itself - a serious lack for my purposes. Either it
To add app to the panel.
First make sure it is not locked, right click the panel and select "unlock Widgets" if it is shown as a menu item.
Then right click on any menu item and select "Add to Panel".
If you want to reposition the app within the panel, click on the "teardrop" on the extreme right of the panel, then drag and drop the app into the required position.
Steve
On Sunday 12 October 2008 06:01, William W. Austin wrote:
The first is a set of problems with pulseaudio. On my favorite workstation, a 64-bit machine with a dual-core cpu, I have both a SB Audigy 2 (350) and sound on the mb 8-channel real-tek.
[snip]
If anyone has a working pulseaudio configuration which successfully drives the Audigy 2 in 5+1 mode, I would love to see it. Even with that I could probably move the speech synthesizer apps to another box.
I don't have F9 on this machine to check, but it seems there were reports of Audigy working with pulseaudio on this list. You may want to check the archives.
The main problem, though, is that you want to use both Audigy and Realtek cards simultaneously, which is problematic to setup (to say the least). There were questions on the list about that as well.
The way I see it, pulseaudio works between userspace apps and ALSA. Its major (or only?) purpose is to make volume controls of various apps independent of each other. A typical use-case: you listen to some music in xmms, and then skype starts ringing. You want to answer the call and talk, while turning the volume of xmms down just a little so it doesn't interfere with your friends voice too much. Without pulseaudio this is downright impossible, because the only volume control available is the system-wide mixer --- which turns volume down for both xmms and skype simultaneously. Pulseaudio is designed to deal with this problem.
Another use-case: you are watching a movie in mplayer, and have to turn the system volume way up high because the movie sound is badly recorded. And in the middle of playback, some background app suddenly crashes, and the KDE sound notification blows away your speakers and your ears. If you had pulseaudio, you could adjust the volume of mplayer and KDE notifications independently.
I believe you have avoided such problems by using two sound cards, but this functionality should better be available in software rather then a hardware requirement. So you may choose to remove pulseaudio altogether and use only alsa and your old setup, or you may choose to try and configure pulseaudio to use both sound cards (though I don't know how to do it).
The other item which has me puzzled and less than happy is kde4. It seems seriously "dumbed down" compared to kde3. Several configuration items are either absent or so well hidden that they might as well be.
This has also been discussed to death on the list. In short, KDE4 is not an upgrade of KDE3, but a complete rewrite from scratch. Given that, it still does lack some configuration options that were present in KDE3 --- the developers just need some more time to implement them again in the new code framework. But it is being done very fast, and KDE 4.2 (iirc, to come with F10) will be much more feature-rich then the present version 4.1.
The complete rewrite of the code is due to the changed paradigm of what a desktop environment should be and how it should function --- note that icons are removed from the desktop and widgets are put on, etc. If you dislike the new paradigm you may stick with the dying KDE3.5, or configure KDE4 to resemble it as much as you can/need.
In particular, having the menu systems pinned (a la windoze) to a spot on a panel rather than being able to assign them to mouse clicks anywhere on the screen is a real drag.
Not sure what you are describing. You can certainly add "Application Launcher" widget to the desktop, move it whereever you like and click on it to open the menus. What else do you have in mind?
And then there is the inability to add apps to panel itself - a serious lack for my purposes.
Update F9 to current KDE 4.1. Make sure widgets are unlocked. Open the menu in kickoff style, browse to your app, right click and select "add to panel".
Either it was someone's intention to dumb down kde4 the way that gnome has been so that more technical users have to give up and go elsewhere OR a good deal of the "configurability" which was present in kde3 is simply not ready yet for kde4. (yes, I *have* edited my menus - that's not an issue.)
The latter. Not all configurability is ready yet. One thing I miss a lot is panel hiding. I hear it is to be implemented in version 4.2, so I just have to wait for it. :-(
I would simply remove kde4 and go back to kde3, but I have already tried that once, but it was not successful as (at least) a few other apps seem to depend on kde4's presence, so I had to reinstall it.
As I understand it is quite hard to go back. Basically, your best bet would be to remove everything related to KDE4, and then recompile whole KDE3 from source. But I've also read that KDE3 is dying (no longer being developed nor actively maintained) so maybe this is not such a good option for long-term.
On this issue, it's possible that I have missed something, and if so someone please clue me in (I have RTFM'ed AND RTFsourceCode + web searched so much that my eyes are beginning to rebel).
Any suggestions on either of these two points would be VERY greatly appreciated. OTOH I'll probably wake up tomorrow with solutions to all of the above and will feel really stoopid for sending this email.
HTH, :-) Marko
Marko Vojinovic <vvmarko <at> panet.co.yu> writes:
But it is being done very fast, and KDE 4.2 (iirc, to come with F10) will be much more feature-rich then the present version 4.1.
F10 will ship with 4.1.2 or 4.1.3, not 4.2. There's simply no way we can ship 4.2 in F10 when it's not even in alpha yet, its alpha release is scheduled for the day of the final development freeze and the beta release for the day of the F10 release. We just cannot ship F10 with an alpha KDE (even a beta 1 would be bad, and there's no way we can rush that in anyway, even getting the tarballs early as packagers, because Fedora releases are cut some time before the official release date).
The latter. Not all configurability is ready yet. One thing I miss a lot is panel hiding. I hear it is to be implemented in version 4.2, so I just have to wait for it.
We're testing a backport of panel autohiding though. See the kdebase-workspace-4.1.2-5.fc10 package for F10 and the kdebase-workspace-4.1.2-5.fc9 package for F9 (note that you need the 4.1.2 stuff from updates-testing to test that build). I can't promise yet that the feature will stay (we're still gathering feedback - if it's too broken, we'll have to revert it and wait for 4.2), but if it works out fine, it'll likely end up both released with F10 and pushed to the F9 updates.
Kevin Kofler
On Monday 13 October 2008 00:06, Kevin Kofler wrote:
Marko Vojinovic <vvmarko <at> panet.co.yu> writes:
But it is being done very fast, and KDE 4.2 (iirc, to come with F10) will be much more feature-rich then the present version 4.1.
F10 will ship with 4.1.2 or 4.1.3, not 4.2. There's simply no way we can ship 4.2 in F10 when it's not even in alpha yet, its alpha release is scheduled for the day of the final development freeze and the beta release for the day of the F10 release. We just cannot ship F10 with an alpha KDE (even a beta 1 would be bad, and there's no way we can rush that in anyway, even getting the tarballs early as packagers, because Fedora releases are cut some time before the official release date).
Ok, but I guess that it would eventually become available and get pulled in with the updates? Or will it appear not before F11?
We're testing a backport of panel autohiding though. See the kdebase-workspace-4.1.2-5.fc10 package for F10 and the kdebase-workspace-4.1.2-5.fc9 package for F9 (note that you need the 4.1.2 stuff from updates-testing to test that build). I can't promise yet that the feature will stay (we're still gathering feedback - if it's too broken, we'll have to revert it and wait for 4.2), but if it works out fine, it'll likely end up both released with F10 and pushed to the F9 updates.
That's good news! Hope it will work out ok! :-)
Best, :-) Marko
On Sunday 12 October 2008 08:01, William W. Austin wrote:
The first is a set of problems with pulseaudio. On my favorite workstation, a 64-bit machine with a dual-core cpu, I have both a SB Audigy 2 (350) and sound on the mb 8-channel real-tek.
Prior to f9, I have been running both for years without any problems. The Audigy has been driving a 5+1 speaker system while the other was used to pipe output from a speech synthesizer to a different set of speakers. Until f9 and pulseaudio this worked without a whimper.
I have now spent about 2 weeks reading everything I could find about pulseaudio and am beginning to be convinced that either (a) the system is inherently not usable for my setup, or (b) someone hosed up the implementation used in f9. From reading the problems in bugzilla - especially the ones close as 'not a bug,' I have become convinced that my only alternatives are to go back down to f8 OR to remove all pulseaudio components from my system and figure out how to wing it from there.
Thanks,
william w. austin waustin@speakeasy.net "life is just another phase i'm going through. this time, anyway ..."
I can't help with configuring Pulseaudio, as on both F8, and F9 I disabled it, because sound no longer worked with my Audigy2 soundblaster card. With 2 soundcards I can imagine the problem being even worse.
To disable Pulseaudio, you only need to remove the package alsa-plugins-pulseaudio, which will also remove the kde-settings-pulseaudio package. By doing this your sound apps will revert to using Alsa directly, as on earlier versions of Fedora. Hopefully that will be enough, so that you can get your 2 cards up and running again.
If you have audio apps that use SDL, you can also add this line to ~/.bashrc, which will remove the hack that SDL programs need, to use Pulseaudio. See below.
unset SDL_AUDIODRIVER
All the best.
Nigel.
On Sun, 2008-10-12 at 02:01 -0400, William W. Austin wrote:
And then there is the inability to add apps to panel itself - a serious lack for my purposes.
[...]
On this issue, it's possible that I have missed something, and if so someone please clue me in (I have RTFM'ed AND RTFsourceCode + web searched so much that my eyes are beginning to rebel).
You need to check the archives of this list. This question has been answered at least half a dozen times before (I won't bother repeating it as other people have already done so). It's one of those "easy when you know how" things, like a lot of other KDE4 stuff. To repeat: KDE4 is not an upgrade of KDE3, it's a completely new desktop. I've been using it for several months now and once you get used to the idea it's actually perfectly serviceable.
poc
William W. Austin wrote:
I have been running linux since at least before rh5.0, and have built and maintained many machines (both personal and professional - including some fairly sophisticated networked machines) for a long time. But now I have hit two problems which have me stumped.
The first is a set of problems with pulseaudio. On my favorite workstation, a 64-bit machine with a dual-core cpu, I have both a SB Audigy 2 (350) and sound on the mb 8-channel real-tek.
Prior to f9, I have been running both for years without any problems. The Audigy has been driving a 5+1 speaker system while the other was used to pipe output from a speech synthesizer to a different set of speakers. Until f9 and pulseaudio this worked without a whimper.
I have now spent about 2 weeks reading everything I could find about pulseaudio and am beginning to be convinced that either (a) the system is inherently not usable for my setup, or (b) someone hosed up the implementation used in f9. From reading the problems in bugzilla - especially the ones close as 'not a bug,' I have become convinced that my only alternatives are to go back down to f8 OR to remove all pulseaudio components from my system and figure out how to wing it from there.
Your (a) and (b) are not mutually exclusive.
On older releases you could choose the mode of your audio system, and use 5+1 or just front, or whatever. PA not only doesn't seem to have that capability, it blocks doing it at the ALSA or lower level (AFAIK).
In FC10 beta PA refused to use my old SB16 card, even though there's a driver for it. Wasn't detected at install, wasn't used with the driver manually loaded, no more odd problems with PA. Hey, it's beta, the card is old, I'm waiting until later to complain. But emulating the card in KVM, it works with FC9, not with FC10, so something has changed. I only have one real card, I was just playing.
-
Bill Davidsen -
Kevin Kofler -
Marko Vojinovic -
Nigel Henry -
Patrick O'Callaghan -
Steve Searle -
William W. Austin