[rescue] Happy New Year! RIP, Sun/Solaris...

[Joshua Boyd]

On Thu, Jan 06, 2011 at 03:26:07PM -0500, Phil Stracchino wrote:
> On 01/06/11 14:56, James C wrote:
> > lsof is also your friend trying to find who's using /dev/audio. Also 
> > check /dev/dsp. A fair few modern systems don't have either, as they're 
> > OSS and most are moving on from ALSA to PulseAudio already.
> 
> Uuuhhh ...   but PulseAudio is a layer on top of ALSA.  (A layer which
> is being deprecated, I might add, at least in Gentoo, because it's a crock.)

I don't think that PulseAudio is deprecated in Ubuntu.  Anyone know for
Fedora/RH? 

PulseAudio has been (and still is) rough, especially when dealing with
pro and semi-pro interfaces or multiple interfaces.  However, I think
that something is needed, and PulseAudio seems more capable than what
came before it (esd, arts, etc).  

My personal problems that involve PulseAudio are:
- For some reason Input/Output configuration for a bunch of devices was
  dropped (alsa say all inputs/outputs were present, and jack could use
  them, but port audio wouldn't).  Solution, drop one or more files in a
  directory and restart pulse audio.  Actually, my solution was to sell
  that PCI card and get a USB interface[0].

- Sometimes gets "stuck".  I only see this on one machine with a rather
  old PCI sound card ( C-Media CM8738 chipset ).  I blame pulseaudio
  because restarting just it corrects the issue.  The most common
  trigger is flash, but nautilus and mplayer can also trigger it.  When
  I used 32bit linux, there was no issue, and when I use a different
  sound device there is no issue.  

[0]  Of course, it just disappears from time to time, but that doesn't
appear to be pulse audios fault at all.