Proposal: stop configuring soundcards through /etc/modprobe.conf

[Lennart Poettering]

On Wed, 20.02.08 22:40, Hans de Goede (j.w.r.degoede at hhs.nl) wrote:

> So our current scheme has a number of problems, which can be workaround, 
> but that would require some serious surgery to system-config-soundcard, and 
> I wonder if this is the right solution. Esp since we have been slowly 
> moving away from using /etc/modprobe.conf at all, to a system where udev 
> loads all drivers (and udev also already loads the soundrivers).

s-c-s has already been removed from the default installation
process. It's still around for debugging purposes. But on a normal
system it shouldn't write anything to /etc/modprobe.conf anymore.

> Given that pulseaudio is integrated with hal and that we are
> moving to pulseaudio, I think that the solution is to stop trying to hard 
> assign indexes to soundcards, or to add module aliases for them to 
> /etc/modprobe.conf. Just let udev load the modules (as it already
> does).

Yes, that's the idea.

> pulseaudio gives names to soundcards based on various info, which does not
> include the topology of the connection to the device for example:
> usb_device_d8c_201_noserial_if0_sound_card_0_alsa_playback_0
> So one could make for example an usb headset the prefered default 
> sound-device in pulseaudio, and then it would use that when available even 
> independend of in which usb port it is plugged.

The current scheme of PA is ver simplistic. It's good enough for most
cases, but with the changes coming to HAL/DK we will eventually be
able to implement a better scheme for identifying devices by serial#,
vendor/product, or path.

> All we then need is a (simple) tool to change the default output device for 
> pulseaudio, and put that under an appropriately named menu entry under user 
> preferences. This is another advantage of this new scheme, the default 
> output device then become a per user preference instead of a system wide 
> settings, as it should be.

That tool is already thre. Just run pavucontrol, and right click on
the device you want to make the default. It already is per-user.

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering                        Red Hat, Inc.
lennart [at] poettering [dot] net         ICQ# 11060553
http://0pointer.net/lennart/           GnuPG 0x1A015CC4