Is the new sound system in F8 - pulseaudio - as big a disaster as it seems to me? 1 - Apparently pulseaudio is a daemon that must be running all the time, just to produce the simplest sound. 2 - Sounds work only while running gnome, because only gnome knows how to start the daemon. I don't use gnome; I use XFCE4. Why would starting this sound daemon be assigned to a window manager, of all things? What perverted software architect makes using the sound system dependent on a window manager - any window manager? 3 - There are no man pages. There are 15 packages named "*pulse*" - and not a single man page. 4 - I have a simple notion of what I need the sound system to do: At system startup, before login, I want to run /usr/bin/aplay -q /usr/share/sounds/startup3.wav If I cannot do something this basic, what do I care about all the vaunted "ear candy"? 5 - The http://www.pulseaudio.org/ web page is a paean to the wonders of this new system, but has precious little instruction on how to actually make it work. The topic "Command Line Interface" seems to address this issue, listing many commands that can be used in configuration scripts. At the end is an example: Example Configuration Script Mark the following script as executable (chmod +x) and run it for a sensible PulseAudio configuration. #!/usr/bin/pulseaudio -nF # Create autoload entries for the device drivers add-autoload-sink output module-alsa-sink device=plughw:0,0 rate=48000 sink_name=output add-autoload-sink output2 module-oss device=/dev/dsp1 record=0 sink_name=output2 add-autoload-sink combined module-combine master=output slaves=output2 sink_name=combined < remaining commands snipped > Clearly, this instruction is not to be taken literally; the script contains commands that do not exist in Linux. Rather, I assume the script is meant to replace /etc/pulse/default.pa, which is purportedly used to configure a starting pulseaudio daemon, so I tried that, and ran pulseaudio --system --log-target=syslog expecting to have the daemon initialized and to hear 'startup3.wav'. Instead, /var/log/messages receives a list of error messages, eg Nov 13 13:32:18 datbird pulseaudio[2693]: module-alsa-sink.c: Error opening PCM device plughw:0,0: No such device Nov 13 13:32:18 datbird pulseaudio[2693]: module.c: Failed to load module "module-alsa-sink" (argument: "device=plughw:0,0 rate=48000 sink_name=output"): initialization failed. Nov 13 13:32:18 datbird pulseaudio[2693]: module-combine.c: Invalid master sink 'output' Nov 13 13:32:18 datbird pulseaudio[2693]: module.c: Failed to load module "module-combine" (argument: "master=output slaves=output2 sink_name=combined"): initialization failed. ... Clearly. I'm missing some important info. What is a "PCM device plughw:0,0", and why don't I have one??? How is one supposed to figure this thing out? Does anyone know how to enable the sound system outside of a window manager? Sorry, but I think pulseaudio isn't ready for prime time, yet. -- David A. De Graaf DATIX, Inc. Hendersonville, NC dad@xxxxxxxx www.datix.us
