After writing about how great Hardy was, I suddenly started experiencing
mysterious crashes of various applications on my desktop. That'll
teach me to say anything nice about an operating system! Firefox,
Pidgin, Deskbar, and even the Gnome Panel would periodically freeze
up. It seemed particularly exacerbated by running applications in
the Flash and AIR runtimes — which was pretty bad news, since I am
supposed to be writing some code in Flex!
Eventually, I caught one of these programs in the act, and traced the buggy behavior down to the PulseAudio daemon.
Apparently this is a common problem, with a bewildering array of elaborate and perplexing "solutions". I spent hours trying to figure out some kind of combination of ALSA and Pulse tools that would get me out of the increasingly crashy situation on my desktop. Oddly, nobody mentions the most obvious solution:
"Turn it off."
While I can appreciate the benefits that Pulse will (eventually) bring, it seems that it doesn't actually do anything for me today. The main idea is that Pulse will allow me to play and record multiple sounds simultaneously. However, the out-of-the-box Ubuntu ALSA experience allows me to do this with my current sound card. I don't pretend to understand why — maybe my card supports multiple channels, maybe things are using dmix somehow — but there is no problem to solve. Running the
I wanted to remove the pulseaudio package, but it turns out that would remove the
Better luck next time to the Ubuntu audio team! I look forward to using all these cool pulseaudio gadgets next time. I hope skype, flash, air, and the dozen other proprietary-and-wrong audio apps out there get fixed before Intrepid hits the shelves.
Eventually, I caught one of these programs in the act, and traced the buggy behavior down to the PulseAudio daemon.
Apparently this is a common problem, with a bewildering array of elaborate and perplexing "solutions". I spent hours trying to figure out some kind of combination of ALSA and Pulse tools that would get me out of the increasingly crashy situation on my desktop. Oddly, nobody mentions the most obvious solution:
"Turn it off."
While I can appreciate the benefits that Pulse will (eventually) bring, it seems that it doesn't actually do anything for me today. The main idea is that Pulse will allow me to play and record multiple sounds simultaneously. However, the out-of-the-box Ubuntu ALSA experience allows me to do this with my current sound card. I don't pretend to understand why — maybe my card supports multiple channels, maybe things are using dmix somehow — but there is no problem to solve. Running the
pulseaudio daemon actually has the
opposite effect: sounds from multiple programs stop working.I wanted to remove the pulseaudio package, but it turns out that would remove the
ubuntu-desktop package as well, which means
everything will probably be broken (certainly when I do my next major
upgrade). So, here's an alternate and non-obvious way to turn it
off, without any fancy configuration:- Go to the "System → Preferences → Sound" in your menu.
- Make sure none of the devices say "Pulse Audio"; they should all say
"Autodetect", "ALSA", or something more specific.
- Click on the "Sounds" tab, and make sure that the "Enable software
sound mixing (ESD)" checkbox is un-checked:
- Log out, and let it trouble you no more.
Better luck next time to the Ubuntu audio team! I look forward to using all these cool pulseaudio gadgets next time. I hope skype, flash, air, and the dozen other proprietary-and-wrong audio apps out there get fixed before Intrepid hits the shelves.