While you two guys, elcore and Alien Bob, certainly have the right and privilege of your opinions on each other, it really isn't relevant to this thread. It's completely ad hominem and in all honesty I didn't detect disrespect in AlienBob's first response which was about the subject. There is no requirement to use steamwebhelper and Steam has created such a sweet environment for encouraging linux ports that, although I do have both a Linux steam and a windows steam (run in wine) for a very long time I have had no need to run the windows version of steam. Only one 14 year old game relies on it and I'm just not motivated to play that game and I have never used steamwebhelper and now, thanks to the spotlihght on it that elcore mentioned, I'm further glad I haven't.

I don't understand this petty mess over "random links". When I mouseover a link the actual address is displayed and AFAIK unless that address creates a redirect, which is visible and preventable, there is little concern. I respect each of your methods for handling security but I have to point out "the proof in the pudding" that I am on my PC many hours every day for well over 20 years, have been running Linux as my Main for almost that long (since 1999-2000) and most of which has been on an "always up" ISP service and never once suffered a successful attack, actually in my entire online life which began with OS/2 2.1. Only in Windows have any malware ever managed to sneak in and was always quarantined and removed almost immediately so IMHO security is certainly not a problem for me.

More to the point, while I don't like the very regular blind updates from Steam that sometimes break things for awhile, all they break is Steam itself. I have never experienced Steam intrusion affecting my core system, ever. Case Closed. at least for the time leading up to now.

My concerns in this thread have been to put a very tight leash on Pulseaudio and that part is solved. I also hoped to learn some new things about DBus but I suppose that's going to take further plodding along on my own, so I'm marking this thread Solved.

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What do you want to know about DBus? I've done some work using DBus and Bluetooth to hook up a heart rate monitor to a Java application (Netbeans platform application, to be picky) so I could monitor my heart rate during exercises at home. I'll say that Bluetooth is a stranger beast than DBus.

I'm a bit worried this may be so close to "necro" that few will see this but it took me this long to try to solve my last remaining issue myself. It may have something to do with dbus, or possibly Wine or possibly even World of Warcraft because i so far only see the error when launching the game. The error message is as follows ====>>>>


I have searched far and wide, tried aplay and arecord with various switches and searched every config file I know of and at this point cannot determine why this error pops up. It mat be worthy of note that it is not some trash error either in that despite the error initially sound will work in other wine apps and in this one, too, but in WOW after asome random time or event audio will just drop out and the game must be completely restarted to return sound to the game... until the next time it fails which may be minutes or hours. I even used Winetricks to set ALSA as the default and never get errors except in this use case but it is driving me a bit balmy trying to fix this. Any help most graciously accepted.

Aside - I will be so glad when the next version of Slackware arrives and choosing ALSA only is possible right from the get-go.

If it helps, I keep an eye on this thread against the eventuality of upgrading my everyday-use laptop from 14.1. I intend to run it ALSA-only and am keen to learn from your experiences.

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FWIW I currently have 3 Slackware installs - a 32 bit ALSA-only, this Multilib main with pulseaudio on a tight leash thanks to some here, especially Didier, and current 64 bit with full default pulseaudio and castrated ALSA. By far I prefer the ALSA-only approach but it is a bit of a pita in 14.2 as there are some packages that by default act as broken.

Thankfully it's looking like the next release will make ALSA-only a simple choice right from the initial install as evidenced by a specific thread to this effect here.. To say I am looking forward to an install that I once again have little need to wrangle about something so fundamental to me as audio is an understatement. Once again, thank you Patrick.

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