Arch Linux

fa2k

Member

Registered: 2013-02-04

Posts: 3

[solved] KDE and Pulseaudio

Update:  A problem with the KDE audio device selection & PA was caused by a script ~/.xprofile which I had from Fedora or PC-BSD. The script prevented the .desktop files in /etc/xdg from being run by changing the XDG path environments. After removing the script, the PulseAudio Sound Server still appears in the KDE device manager, but everything else works as expected.

Hi, I just installed Arch, and I'm having some minor trouble with pulseaudio. The sound works for most applications, but there are some annoyances:

KDE audio device manager shows "PulseAudio Sound server" and a lot of Alsa devices (picture below). It's supposed to only show the PA devices.
There are two pulse-related files in /etc/xdg/autostart: pulseaudio.desktop and pulseaudio-kde.desktop. pulseaudio-kde has a line which says Exec=start-pulseaudio-kde, and start-pulseaudio-kde exists in /usr/bin. This script is supposed to launch the KDE audio device manager module. I have tried to inject a "touch" command into start-pulseaudio-kde, and it appears that this script is not run. Question #1: why are the xdg autostart scripts not run when I log in? (update: removed a bad .xprofile file) I confirm that this script is run, but I still get the strange entries in the KDE window and the minor problems. "pacmd list-modules" shows that module-device-manager is loaded

I may have some stuff in my home directory from when I used Fedora, but I've cleared out ~/.pulse .

The light on the webcam flashes occasionally (it has a mic, and this indicates that something is probing the audio devices)
My script that toggles between two sound cards using "pacmd set-default-sink" no longer works.

I'm sorry to dump these slightly incoherent problems on the forum, but I've spent two days getting the system set up and I've hit a wall with these pulseaudio problems.

Edit: Also, amarok will not play MP3s. VLC and mplayer will. I have installed the gst-codecs packages. Why?

Last edited by fa2k (2013-02-04 23:57:28)