PulseAudio & PolicyKit (PackageKit)

alienman · 2009-06-18 16:21:09

Hi Everybody. I started this thread just for two simple questions since I don't have enough time due to a project to research a little bit more, but I'm sure I will that's a promise.

I'm wondering what is all these new changes and when will they be possible in Arch. I know pulseaudio is a reality but I would like to know if someone knows the pos and the cons and maybe some possible problems related and If I should change alsa for pulseaudio.

And the other one is policykit that it's already installed and I've been using some little things like the synaptics and keyboard. I know some distros are working hard to have a frontend like PackageKit in their distros. My question or doubt here is if one day this frontend will be available for Arch to use as wrapper for pacman or yaourt

Nepherte · 2009-06-18 18:51:43

I wrote an article about pulseaudio in gnome 2.26 2 months ago: http://www.nepherte.be/featuring-pulsea … nome-2-26/ Switching to pulseaudio is not necessary but I kinda like it.

sand_man · 2009-06-18 23:18:06

You don't change alsa to pulseaudio, alsa connects to the pulseaudio server.

AngryKoala · 2009-06-19 07:23:29

Pulse works excellent for me, so I can play things through my headphones and speakers at the same time, or switch a music/internet stream from my speakers to my headset and vice versa. The only quirky thing is volume control, but I use my headset and speaker controls anyway. The con is that there is no gui equalizer, but that can be applied to everything else.

robmaloy · 2009-06-19 11:31:20

Nepherte's article about pulse sounds really nice. i think i'm gonna give it a try

the worst thing about it and the whole FooKit programs is the use of uppercase letters in their names

without completion-ignore-case On, having stuff like /etc/ConsoleKit/ is a PITA imho

edit: XML configuration is not the best thing either

Last edited by robmaloy (2009-06-19 11:33:21)

sand_man · 2009-06-19 12:36:12

i have to agree with you there robmaloy, there is no reason to use caps. It's just annoying.

alienman · 2009-06-19 16:38:01

Thanks to everybody, yes it seems that I don't need to replace alsa and thats goos. I will read your article Nepherte as soon as I finish something that is taking me a lot of time at work. I just read it a little bit an very quickly and looks very interesting, thanks to pointing me to that great resource of you.

Maki · 2009-06-19 21:18:17

AngryKoala wrote:

Pulse works excellent for me, so I can play things through my headphones and speakers at the same time, or switch a music/internet stream from my speakers to my headset and vice versa. The only quirky thing is volume control, but I use my headset and speaker controls anyway. The con is that there is no gui equalizer, but that can be applied to everything else.

You mean with pulse i can continue to listen music on my speakers even if i plug in the headphones in the front jack, or you have an usb headset ?

AngryKoala · 2009-06-19 22:30:46

Maki wrote:

AngryKoala wrote:
Pulse works excellent for me, so I can play things through my headphones and speakers at the same time, or switch a music/internet stream from my speakers to my headset and vice versa. The only quirky thing is volume control, but I use my headset and speaker controls anyway. The con is that there is no gui equalizer, but that can be applied to everything else.
You mean with pulse i can continue to listen music on my speakers even if i plug in the headphones in the front jack, or you have an usb headset ?

I have a separate pci card dedicated to my headset. My speakers I plug into my mobo.

Nepherte · 2009-06-19 22:43:43

You can assign/transfer each audio stream to a specific device, not sure if you can assign a audio stream to a specific output of one single sound card.

AngryKoala · 2009-06-19 22:57:52

Nepherte wrote:

You can assign/transfer each audio stream to a specific device, not sure if you can assign a audio stream to a specific output of one single sound card.

Not at the same time, but certainly you can choose.

Maki · 2009-06-20 09:18:05

AngryKoala wrote:

Maki wrote:
AngryKoala wrote:
Pulse works excellent for me, so I can play things through my headphones and speakers at the same time, or switch a music/internet stream from my speakers to my headset and vice versa. The only quirky thing is volume control, but I use my headset and speaker controls anyway. The con is that there is no gui equalizer, but that can be applied to everything else.
You mean with pulse i can continue to listen music on my speakers even if i plug in the headphones in the front jack, or you have an usb headset ?
I have a separate pci card dedicated to my headset. My speakers I plug into my mobo.

Must be cool having multiple soundcards around , i guess i should put one on my system.

AngryKoala · 2009-06-20 22:43:42

Maki wrote:

AngryKoala wrote:
Maki wrote:
You mean with pulse i can continue to listen music on my speakers even if i plug in the headphones in the front jack, or you have an usb headset ?
I have a separate pci card dedicated to my headset. My speakers I plug into my mobo.
Must be cool having multiple soundcards around , i guess i should put one on my system.

I used to game a lot and so it was a necessity to have a dedicated sound card so I can hear every little sound from any direction clearly. Now, I just use it for music and movies

carlocci · 2009-06-23 13:46:57

Is this the wheel of reincarnation all over again?
Didn't we move to alsa in order not to have audio daemons?

Ranguvar · 2009-06-23 15:15:03

No, "we" moved to ALSA because OSS3 was crusty and OSS4 was proprietary. Now it's not, but "we've" stuck with ALSA.

Nepherte · 2009-06-23 15:22:07

Besides, pulseaudio ran as a user acts totally different from a daemon. For one, you don't need to specify it in your daemon list. Whenever an application wants to output sound, it is spawned.

z0phi3l · 2009-06-23 15:59:47

Maki wrote:

AngryKoala wrote:
Maki wrote:
You mean with pulse i can continue to listen music on my speakers even if i plug in the headphones in the front jack, or you have an usb headset ?
I have a separate pci card dedicated to my headset. My speakers I plug into my mobo.
Must be cool having multiple soundcards around , i guess i should put one on my system.

My headset came with it's own USB soundcard, does help out a lot

alienman · 2009-06-23 22:34:45

It seems very interesting, I will change to pulseaudio sooner, maybe with the next release of GNOME since according to Nepherte this one is hacked by the arch package mainterner.

Thanks a lot for the link to a great article Nepherte, now I understand PulseAudio and that's a change I'll like. BTW Programming with layers isn't bad, actually I consider one of the most important things in programming and design, since you can easily change a layer without many problems.

Thanks a lot to averyone for your comments.

Nepherte · 2009-06-24 12:08:50

Why wait? It's not that hard to reintegrate pulseaudio in gnome. Since a few people have already asked me how, here are some guidelines: http://www.nepherte.be/howto-add-pulsea … rch-linux/

ngoonee · 2009-06-25 00:38:32

AngryKoala wrote:

Nepherte wrote:
You can assign/transfer each audio stream to a specific device, not sure if you can assign a audio stream to a specific output of one single sound card.
Not at the same time, but certainly you can choose.

Actually, there is module-combine-streams (I think that's the name) which allows output to multiple sound cards (sinks) from the same source/sources (audio apps, mostly).

alienman · 2009-06-30 01:46:40

Well, today I just installed PulseAudio and it's working fine, now I can control the volume per aplication, which in fact is a great feature.

Thanks Nepherte for your great guideline.

alienman · 2009-06-30 22:56:20

One Question more, Do you have any idea how to make pulse audio keeps working when changing to a tty. I'm not sure but I think that before this I was able to change to any tty and my banshee keeps working fine, not sure really if thats was previous behavior, maybe someone without pulseaudio could confirm this.

I seldom need to a tty but today that was the case and then I saw this behavior, just wondering if it is normal or maybe a bug, or something relate to the way in which Pulse Audio is started or I just missed installing something.

Thanks in advance.

Nepherte · 2009-07-01 09:01:57

It's because the pulseaudio process isn't running anymore, probably one of the only disadvantages of running pulseaudio on a per user base. Sometimes my music keeps running, sometimes not. I believe you shouldn't have this when running pulseaudio system-wide.

alienman · 2009-07-01 19:38:44

Ok I will try by adding pulseaudio in the daemons array.

It worked fine . I supposed that was the reason, but I didn't tried till today.

Last edited by alienman (2009-07-01 19:46:04)

onestep_ua · 2009-07-23 14:32:06

alienman wrote:

I know some distros are working hard to have a frontend like PackageKit in their distros. My question or doubt here is if one day this frontend will be available for Arch to use as wrapper for pacman or yaourt

pacman backend for PackageKit already exists for ~1.5 years. Please search for 'packagekit' in AUR.

Arch Linux

#1 2009-06-18 16:21:09

PulseAudio & PolicyKit (PackageKit)

#2 2009-06-18 18:51:43

Re: PulseAudio & PolicyKit (PackageKit)

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