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Re: Sound on Linux?



On Saturday 17 March 2007 11:12, Ken Heard wrote:

> "Another factor may or may not be relevant.  Two days ago I compiled
> from source and installed dosemu-1.3.4.  The installation was successful
> in that it is allowing me to use my beloved dos based applications.
> However, the last message returned by ./configure was a warning that SDL
> version 1.2.0 was not found.
>
> "I consequently installed four packages which had sdl in the name:
> libsdl1.2debian, libsdl1.2debian-alsa, libsdl-net1.2 and
> libsdl-sound1.2.  I tried to purge these packages, but aptitude wanted
> to remove a whole series of other packages including grub and icedove.
> So I did not remove them.  I also tried to remove them using Kpackage,
> but Kpackage wanted to remove all of KDE.  So these four sdl packages
> remain installed.  (By the way, why do aptitude and Kpackage want to
> remove different apparent dependencies?  But I digress.)"
>
> Could these packages are also competing to provide sound on the laptop
> and are powerful enough to prevent use of either noatun or KsCD?  I ask
> because I finally remembered that before I had installed dosemu-1.3.4
> and these four sdl packages I had been able to listen to audio CDs with
> noatun.  Now I cannot.
>
> Any opinions on this matter?   In any event, as I do not seem to need
> these packages for dosemu, I should remove them -- once I figure out how
> to do so *without* removing key packages.  I also really wonder whether
> I need to keep the arts set of packages.
>
>     Regards,
>
>     Ken Heard

I've spent some time looking into this today, but my Debian installs are on 
the other machine, and the sound card is an Audigy2 soundblaster, which is 
capable of multiple audio streams, so I've been looking at the problem on my 
FC2 install, with an earlier version of KDE.

First regarding SDL. I installed the relevant SDL packages on FC2 so I could 
play an SDL based game, and I've just looked on Debian Etch, and have 
installed it also on there for some reason or other.  The packages installed 
are.
libsdl-image1.2
libsdl-mixer1.2
libsdl-ttf2.0-0
libsdl1.2debian
libsdl1.2debian-oss
I have the alsa-oss package installed, so the above package doesn't create any 
problems, as the alsa-oss package provides an Alsa emulation layer to apps 
that need to use OSS.

I do not have libsdl-sound1.2, or libsdl-net1.2 installed.

I can't remember why I installed the SDL stuff. That was when my Etch was 
still Sarge, and is probably for some audio app that I installed.

I don't believe there is any problem in leaving those SDL libraries installed, 
as they should only be called on when you run an app that requires them.

btw. Is dosemu working for you?

It's worth installing the alsa-oss package, as if you have any OSS audio apps 
that you want to use, they will then work.

Getting back to KDE, aRts, and Noatun.

Noatun will play a .ogg music file irrespective of whether the check box in 
Controlcentre/sound and multimedia/sound system is checked or not.
Now I do have a one liner in a file named .asoundrc in /home user, and it 
doesn't matter now if that check box is checked or not. I can play a tune 
using Noatun, and play another tune using MhWaveedit at the same time.

The one liner is below with instructions.

Noatun, and playing cd's. I didn't know it could do that. Anyway, when I put a 
CD in the drive on Etch, I get a bit of activity showing on the drive, but 
nothing on the desktop. I then open cdplayer, and the CD is showing there 
with the title of the CD. Then pressing play, just plays the CD. I have seen 
this sort of multiple choice thing when inserting a CD on Fedora Core 5 
though. Btw. I don't though have kaffeine installed, so perhaps it behaves 
differently then.

Another thing to look at is /etc/group , and see if you as user are on the 
cdrom group. IIRC I put myself on that, as before doing so I could only play 
CD's when logged into the desktop as root.

Here's the one liner.

First create a file in your /home/user directory named .asoundrc . Then add 
the following line to the file, highlight, and paste, whatever.

pcm.dsp0 {      type plug      slave.pcm "dmix" }

Save it, and close the file. Seriously I don't know if this will fix any of 
your problems, but now I can have the checkbox in KDE's control centre/sound 
and multimedia/soundsystem checked without causing problems with other music 
apps.

Can't think of much more to say at the moment.

Nigel.




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