Deafening silence

[Craig White]

On Sun, 2010-03-14 at 12:48 -0400, Raymond C. Rodgers wrote:
> On 03/13/2010 06:26 PM, Russell Miller wrote:

> > I use Fedora.  I even somewhat like Fedora.  Apart from the fact that I'm
> > taking my data into my hands with every release (from 11 to 12 I lost all my
> > data on trying to upgrade), and the fact that things randomly break, bug
> > reports do no good, and every now and then three releases later they'll
> > randomly fix themselves, it's a pretty cool OS.  But I don't bother
> > contributing to it.  I just install, and hope it all works out.
> >
> > --Russell
> >    
> That's more or less my situation as well, and I'm frankly getting tired 
> of it. I'd say I might move on to another distro altogether, but in my 
> humble opinion Fedora seems to be the best of the distros, so moving on 
> wouldn't do anything for me. As much as I hate to say or even think it, 
> becoming a full time Windows servant is sadly looking more attractive... 
> At least my sound didn't just stop working for no reason in Windows a 
> few weeks ago like it did in Fedora. (For *that* problem, I simply 
> bought a cheap SB X-Fi card, but even then it doesn't work as well in 
> Fedora as it does in Windows.)
----
since you mentioned it, I'll provide a brief overview on pulse audio as
I understand it (and I could very much be wrong).

Linux has had sound devices and drivers since way back but the software
had always laid claim to the devices directly which didn't permit things
like alert sounds sent by the OS when you were say playing music or
watching youtube or whatever. It was pretty much a first come, first
served system and whichever software you were using laid claim to the
device and all others were essentially locked out until the particular
software laying claim released its hold. Likewise, when multiple users
were accessing the same computer, the first user would prevent sound
from working for all other users.

Like what occurred over time to give device control to users for things
like removable disks, the sound software needed to evolve to userland
functionality and a traffic cop so to speak was needed to permit
multiple users, processes access to the sound system. It was from this
that pulse audio was born.

Now the pulse audio software seems to be written mostly by one person
paid by Red Hat and he is progressing at a fairly reasonable rate. He
doesn't seem particularly motivated to responding to bug reports (and
maybe even to the point of dismissive). It seems to me that pulse audio
is getting better with each passing release. Note that most every
distribution is also using pulse audio now.

If you add in the fact that there is still a lot of software that still
tries to claim the raw devices instead of get access via pulse audio you
begin to realize that even if you had a perfectly working pulse audio
configuration, it only takes one application, either too old to
recognize the existence of pulse audio or via mis-configuration (perhaps
upgraded from earlier versions), that still tries to communicate
directly with the raw devices to toss the monkey wrench into the works.

One of the problems of a support list like this is that there are many
people offering advice not because they understand the layers and
complexities involved but rather they found a sequence that worked for
them and it's entirely possible that their circumstances don't resemble
yours and the net effect is terrible. This seems to be especially true
for sound problems and in the past, many have simply suggested
removing/disabling pulse audio. Unfortunately, the list doesn't have
someone skilled on sound issues like we have Tim Waugh to help with
printing issues. Therefore, it is left to the user with the problems to
discern what the relative worth of the various suggestions that are
being offered and it's very difficult and awkward.

Craig


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