Gnome3 without pulseaudio (again)

Question

Hi all,
I always have had a particular hate for pulseaudio, a sound daemon that stands as a layer between apps and the hardware. Great idea, if it only worked! It doesn't!
Configuring and getting it to work is a real pain, as it doesn't work out-of-the box.
Gnome 3 now seems to depend on pulseaudio, which I think it's a bad decision. At least KDE let's you choose!
I was about to ditch Gnome3 - even though I was enjoying the experience - then I came accross a thread in this forum where other people have the same problems with pulseaudio. The topic is this: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=117986 (post #9)
So I did all that. Renamed and later deleted all pulseaudio-* under /etc/xdg, launched gnome-session-properties to disable pulseaudio, deleted .desktop files under ~/.config/autostart and even then it seemed to start.
Installed alsa-utils, ran alsaconf, rebooted.. And pulseaudio was still there. Don't know what process is is invoking it, but I'm guessing it's the neat volume manager in the tray.
Finally I ran gstreamer-properties, chose ALSA instead of pulseaudio, and then....renamed pulseaudio itself mv /usr/bin/pulseaudio /usr/bin/pulseaudio.o.
Ah.............................everything was just working normally, except for the volume keys (as the neat volume manager disappeared)
So, how Can I replace the default app in the tray?
The sound definitions under System seem to be pulseaudio related and now no soundcard is shown.
Any ideas?
Last edited by aurocha (2011-05-09 23:22:17)

Answer 1

You can blow Pulse off your system entirely by doing pacman -Rnsdd pulseaudio. (I also got rid of pulseaudio-alsa. I don't know if you need that if you're using something other than OSS). After removing it, I unchecked/disabled all references to Pulse everywhere I could find in config utilities, and then deleted every file that had that nasty p-word in its name anywhere in ~/.
Then I had to go through this harrowing process to get sound working as one would expect it to: pacman -S oss.
I had the same issues as you, though, thanks to Pulse integration. Basically, no volume control: Volume icon does nothing, multimedia keys don't work, and there's no OSD indicator when the volume is/should be changing.
For the first problem, oh well, I removed the volume icon from the panel. I always did that, anyway, because I just use the keyboard.
For the second, I created three one-line scripts and bound them to my multimedia keys. For oss,
Volume up: ossxmix vmix0-outvol +1
Volume down: ossxmix vmix0-outvol -- -1
Mute: ossxmix vmix0-outvol 0
These are the laziest things ever. Mute just turns the volume all the way down, it can't return you to where you were. The OSS FAQ has more sophisticated script examples, if you're into that. I think the third problem (no OSD) can be resolved with scripting, too.
ALSA can be controlled via scripting with amixer: http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/gut … xer.1.html
Rant time: I have no idea why the GNOME guys decided to integrate with a particular sound system. Linux sound is a total mess. Users' needs and mileage vary so greatly -- nothing works for everyone. In my personal experiences, OSS has always worked 100% out of the box with zero effort or configuration, whereas with Pulse the closest I ever got was, "I can make sound from one application, but please don't try to use two at the same time or everything will explode." I gave Pulse about 45 minutes after GNOME3 came along. Then it was like, "Why am I wrestling with this when OSS was already working with no effort?"