Adrian just upgraded lisas.de to Fedora 12 and that brought us an upgraded python. Unfortunately the current planet version uses the md5 module which has now been deprecated, so cron now sends me one deprecation warning per hour, which is rather frustrating. I wrote a little patch to fix the planet and this entry will be the one to test the patched planet with. If it works I’ll add the patch to bug #552462.
Archive for the 'Fedora' Category
Yes, I knew this would happen. However, that does not diminish my frustration. Of all the desktop machines that I work with, I only use three to play audio frequently. These machines currently run Ubuntu Jaunty, Ubuntu Karmic and Fedora 11. For each setup I had the good intention of keeping PulseAudio after installation, but it failed on each installation for a separate reason:
- On the machine running Karmic, vlc (the only player capable to properly play my AVCHD recordings) will drop frames like hell when running with PulseAudio.
- The Jaunty machine is a rather powerful quad-core with a high-end sound card and just listening to music with totem I will actually get occasional buffer underruns (stuttering audio) when running a kernel compile.
- On the Fedora machine I’d like to run mpd on start-up as a different user than the one logged in (who is forced to run PulseAudio) and this is not easily possible (or maybe not at all).
Even worse, it is becoming more and more painful to remove PulseAudio. You will loose ubuntu-desktop and gnome-bluetooth (also on Fedora). For Karmic I had to recompile gnome-session or else it will fully load one core trying to connect to PulseAudio. Gnome will no longer let you control the volume, neither from the panel nor via the keyboard.
So now we have shiny new features (that I never had a chance to use, because I always have to disable PulseAudio), but solid, reliable and easy sound output is history. Congratulations on breaking Linux Audio!
The level of maturity the GNOME desktop has achieved by now, seems to a have a negative effect on innovation. Even for experienced GNOME users it is becoming harder and harder to detect or name the changes that came with the recent GNOME releases. Whether this is a good thing (the learning curve for using a GNOME update is practically non-existent) or a bad thing (boooooring) is still the subject of numerous discussions on Planet GNOME and the GNOME mailing lists.
I am happy to see that GNOME innovation is not dead yet: I just discovered GNOME Do and I am impressed. Obviously I just started using it, so I cannot say whether it will stick, but this tool could severly influence the way I use my GNOME desktop in the future. What it does is actually hard to describe, basically it brings to GNOME what the new location bar brought to Firefox 3. I recommend trying the latest version, which is easy with Ubuntu, with Fedora however you are stuck with the 0.4.0.2 release as even in development the necessary dependencies are not available yet.
Update: Adrian let me know that there is a bug requesting Fedora to update GNOME Do to 0.5.0.1, though it doesn’t look like it’s going to be resolved quickly.
There was a time when Linux distributions automatically started sound daemons for the user. Typically these were aRts for KDE and esd for Enlightenment, Gnome and others. The main goal was to allow simultaneous audio playback from multiple applications.
Unfortunately, using these daemons has side effects:
- they introduce significant latency
- they require applications to be ported and configured to use them
- they block the audio device for either serious or rather dumb audio applications
Then, thanks to an tremendous development effort, a new audio layer for Linux was born that addressed the main goal of these daemons, allowing hardware mixing where available and enabling software mixing when necessary. The daemons became obsolete and were eventually removed from the default install of all major distributions. The only daemon that stayed relevant was JACK as it addressed audio production needs and most sound creation tools were extended to support that interface, too.
Now, guess what. There’s a new daemon in town. It’s better than ESD, but will still block your audio device. And from what I’ve read it is not designed to compete with JACK in the ultra-low-latency sector. A major motivation for its creation must have been a severe allergic reaction to ALSA. And Fedora and Ubuntu intend to force it upon us.
I got aware of that after upgrading my laptop to hardy, when mplayer failed to playback audio until I killed the pulseaudio daemon. Oh man, was I happy when the daemons where gone.
Yeah, I know, they promise some interesting features. I also read that PulseAudio is causing significant load under certain conditions. I’m just not sure that you really need an extra CPU hog just to play audio, unless you really dedicate your machine to audio production in which case I cannot see why we should not stick with JACK.
I really wonder whether investing all that energy into improving ALSA instead (and maybe gstreamer or JACK) might have helped to provide some of the same features without the hassle of yet another daemon with yet another API.