Re: the State of Linux Audio
Hi Martin,
Martin G. McCormick wrote:
> I'm the one who has been asking questions about getting an
> old Dell Dimension mother board with an on-board CS4236 sound
> card to work again after upgrading to wheezy.
[....]
> This system also has no X-windows clients and thus is a
> command-line-only system but I constantly see the following
> message in syslog:
>
> wb5agz pulseaudio[20877]: [pulseaudio] server-lookup.c:
> Unable to contact D-Bus: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.Not Supported: Unable
> to autolaunch a dbus-daemon without a $DISPLAY for X11
Pulse audio requires D-Bus, and D-Bus is the underlying RPC
mechanism of a large and controversial software stack
developed to support desktop applications.
Apparently pulseaudio is unable to get D-Bus services,
due to a dependency of the latter on X.
So you need either to satisfy/finesse this dependency of
D-Bus, or disable/remove pulseaudio. I've read but not
tested apulse, a library that purports to presents a pulse
audio API to applications such as skype that require them,
relaying the audio to ALSA.
If you have a choice, perhaps you can select linux audio
applications that target ALSA, or if you are involved in
music production, JACK.
A few have reported good results with the latest OSS audio
drivers (an alternative to ALSA), however these are
definitely in the minority.
Cheers,
Joel
> This looks pretty sick to me but it could be that the
> daemon is working but just can't shout out to anyone which is
> kind of dumb since an error message looks just as informative on
> a console as it does in a GUI.
>
> The only reason I put pulseaudio on here was way back
> when I was running lenny and had no /dev/dsp. Someone suggested
> installing pulseaudio. I did. /dev/dsp came back and life
> marched on.
>
> Generally, sound got easier and better with upgrades but
> the upgrade to wheezy turned back the clock and sound is broken
> for all practical purposes. There were actually two sound
> cards, the CS4236 on the mother board plus an AWE64 Gold which
> behaves like a SBLive board in Linux. No wave tables or other
> special effects but recording and playback are fine.
>
> After the wheezy upgrade, both sound cards went poof and
> one would never know they were there except the CS4236 shows up
> in dmesg as a plug-and-play card. The SBLive does a better job
> of hiding but manages to sometimes be able to kill the Ethernet
> interface probably by fighting over the same interrupt.
> a Soundblaster Digi which is a fancy USB card that had worked
> fairly well both recording and playing under squeeze now limps
> along with only playback of the left and right channels and
> absolutely nothing else.
>
> Nothing regarding sound is better on this system and
> many things that have worked flawlessly for over ten years such
> as the ability to autodetect the on-board sound card and install
> a /dev/dsp device are all gone.
>
> I have an ace in the hole in that I had an extra boot
> drive so I used dd to copy the original squeeze drive to the new
> soon-to-be wheezy drive. After running the upgrade and loosing
> all the sound, I can simply slip the squeeze drive back in and
> there should be music again but support for squeeze is running
> out soon and, as a retired worker in network operations, I know
> that one of the best ways to be safe on the internet is to keep
> your computer's OS up to date. The rifraf out there will at
> least have a little more trouble cracking your system if it is
> current than they will if it is several revisions behind and
> all the bad guys know how to break in.
>
> Except for the sound, everything else seems to be in
> order though it is, of course, hard to tell for sure until you
> try to do something and now you can't when you could before the
> upgrade.
>
> Legacy code is not necessarily bad and one would hope
> that new code builds on the legacy as opposed to just whacking
> off stuff that used to work and replacing it with something that
> instantly renders a whole table full of equipment useless. One
> expects things like that from purely commercial software but one
> of the neat things about Linux is that it isn't or at least
> wasn't quite as picky about hardware.
>
> Oh well, I am dangerously close to ranting so let's stop
> and see what others say.
>
> Mainly, if there is a better way to do Linux sound, I'm
> all ears. The silence is deafening.
>
> Martin McCormick
>
>
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>
--
Joel Roth
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