Playing with Pulse Audio on PCLinuxOS

[TerryH]

Thanks Tex, this has been an annoyance for the last 2-3 weeks.  It's working fine now and I'll have a better chance of fixing it in the furture.

[TheGhost]

Just to report a hardware test:

I am using a generic USB sound card. I was having problems getting sound from Youtube (Firefox), although I had gotten it working with everything else (Amarok, Mpllayer, etc).

Following Textar's instructions worked for me, with one minor variant:
When going to the sound configuration from PCC, it says that "No Sound Card has been detected on your machine." Apparently, the PCC app is not able to detect such USB card.
I manually did the changes to /etc/modprobe.conf, /etc/sysconfig/pulseaudio, and the /etc/alternatives/soundprofile symlink; and I got sound in Firefox! Sound in Amarok and Mplayer is still working OK; so this solution seems to work with generic USB sound cards.

Hope this helps.

[agmg]

First time I tried to install PulseAudio on KDE 2011.09 I failed. After checking PulseAudio on system settings, it wasn't checked after reboot. I deleted the file suggested by Texstar, check remained after reboot but no PulseAudio. Didn't try the troubleshooting cause I did a clean installation. I gave it another try and voila! PulseAudio works perfectly from the first reboot. I now have sound through my HDMI and can watch movies on my TV using PCLinusOS and not another OS.

How did that happen?

[Nish]

First time I tried to install PulseAudio on KDE 2011.09 I failed. After checking PulseAudio on system settings, it wasn't checked after reboot. I deleted the file suggested by Texstar, check remained after reboot but no PulseAudio. Didn't try the troubleshooting cause I did a clean installation. I gave it another try and voila! PulseAudio works perfectly from the first reboot. I now have sound through my HDMI and can watch movies on my TV using PCLinusOS and not another OS.

How did that happen?

That is probably the way I am going to go.  I have another thread elsewhere that I had to give up and uninstalled taskpulseaudio and went back to the way it was, had already been troubleshooting awhile and my sound was fine on speakers, just no hdmi.

I am thinking of a clean install with 2011 and perhaps I will have a "voila" moment, too.

[AndrzejL]

Will this eventually fixes my problem of getting my USB speaker (Logitech S-150) to work? Thinking of trying it out, but wondering if there is a way to revert to default setting if things get even worse. This is my main working system anyway.

I have been using Pulse for quite some time and yes it allows user to control the sources and the sinks for all the audio streams ........  but you need to install the Pulse plugins for the applications you use.

***

Tex,
          Just had a look at my  /etc/sysconfig/pulseaudio  file and the entry there is

Code: [Select]

PULSE_SERVER_TYPE=none
Is there any information about the differences this may cause in operation?

I also notice the following

/etc/alternatives/soundprofile symlink should be pointing to /etc/sound/profiles/pulse folder

Here it actually point to

Code: [Select]

/etc/sound/profiles/alsa

The real question is .......  should the present working settings be changed manually?


Thank you.

regards.

I have finally decided to bit the bullet and move away from alsa to pulse audio on my main machine.

In my case the server was personal but the symlink was pointing to alsa so I removed and recreated it.

My question is - I have sound BUT how do I check if I am using pulse audio or alsa?

More questions on the way possibly

Cheers.

Andy

[AndrzejL]

Aw... Started the PCC > Hardware > Sound Config and...

Here you can select an alternative driver (either OSS or ALSA) for your sound card (Intel Corporation|82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) AC'97 Audio Controller).

Your card currently use the ALSA "snd_intel8x0" driver (default driver for your card is "snd_intel8x0")

I guess something went wrong? Pulse is unchecked... Glitch free mode is checked... I guess it won't make it easy on me...

[Just17]

PulseAudio is not a replacement for Alsa ......  it is a user level layer to allow the user to control the sound streams to and from their devices without - for the most part - resorting to any file edits or command line stuff.

There should be no need to do any file or link changes for an operational PA in PCLOS.

I advise you to install pavucontrol, and use it after enabling PA in PCC-System-Sound and rebooting.

[AndrzejL]

Problem is somewhere else in my opinion altho I might be wrong...

[andrzejl@icsserver ~]$ sleep 2; pulseaudio -vv
I: main.c: setrlimit(RLIMIT_NICE, (31, 31)) failed: Operation not permitted
D: core-rtclock.c: Timer slack is set to 50 us.
D: core-util.c: RealtimeKit worked.
I: core-util.c: Successfully gained nice level -11.
I: main.c: This is PulseAudio 0.9.23-1pclos2011
D: main.c: Compilation host: i586-mandriva-linux-gnu
D: main.c: Compilation CFLAGS: -O2  -pipe -Wformat -Werror=format-security -Wp,-D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -fomit-frame-pointer -march=i586 -mtune=generic -fasynchronous-unwind-tables -Wall -W -Wextra -pipe -Wno-long-long -Winline -Wvla -Wno-overlength-strings -Wunsafe-loop-optimizations -Wundef -Wformat=2 -Wlogical-op -Wsign-compare -Wformat-security -Wmissing-include-dirs -Wformat-nonliteral -Wold-style-definition -Wpointer-arith -Winit-self -Wdeclaration-after-statement -Wfloat-equal -Wmissing-prototypes -Wstrict-prototypes -Wredundant-decls -Wmissing-declarations -Wmissing-noreturn -Wshadow -Wendif-labels -Wcast-align -Wstrict-aliasing=2 -Wwrite-strings -Wno-unused-parameter -ffast-math -Wp,-D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -fno-common -fdiagnostics-show-option
D: main.c: Running on host: Linux i686 3.2.16-pclos1.bfs #1 SMP PREEMPT Mon Apr 23 07:40:32 CEST 2012
D: main.c: Found 1 CPUs.
I: main.c: Page size is 4096 bytes
D: main.c: Compiled with Valgrind support: yes
D: main.c: Running in valgrind mode: no
D: main.c: Running in VM: no
D: main.c: Optimized build: yes
D: main.c: All asserts enabled.
I: main.c: Machine ID is 82ab6c261883e9ffe2a80b674b7b435e.
I: main.c: Session ID is 82ab6c261883e9ffe2a80b674b7b435e-1336256597.820726-1128943974.
I: main.c: Using runtime directory /home/andrzejl/.pulse/82ab6c261883e9ffe2a80b674b7b435e-runtime.
I: main.c: Using state directory /home/andrzejl/.pulse.
I: main.c: Using modules directory /usr/lib/pulse-0.9.23/modules.
I: main.c: Running in system mode: no
I: main.c: Fresh high-resolution timers available! Bon appetit!
I: cpu-x86.c: CPU flags: CMOV MMX SSE SSE2
I: svolume_mmx.c: Initialising MMX optimized functions.
I: remap_mmx.c: Initialising MMX optimized remappers.
I: svolume_sse.c: Initialising SSE2 optimized functions.
I: remap_sse.c: Initialising SSE2 optimized remappers.
I: sconv_sse.c: Initialising SSE2 optimized conversions.
D: memblock.c: Using shared memory pool with 1024 slots of size 64.0 KiB each, total size is 64.0 MiB, maximum usable slot size is 65496
E: main.c: Daemon startup without any loaded modules, refusing to work.
I: main.c: Daemon terminated.

Removed ~/.pulse and made sure that the /usr/lib/pulse-0.9.23/modules is populated with modules.

IF I ran pulseaudio as root I got the same error as above + to add --system to the command line.

I did so - now it told me that there was no pulse user (systemwide control rather then per user) so I temporarily created pulse user and started pulseaudio --system. This started the pulseaudio process.

I think I am dealing with either permission error OR some unknown factor .

[Just17]

Seems you may not have it properly installed.

Did you use the 'task' meta package to install?

Have you pavucontrol installed?

What about ticking to enable in PCC and rebooting? .....  is it still ticked after the reboot?