Hello everyone!

I'm running the 64 bit version of Slackware 14.2, and am about to try to set up Jack and PulseAudio on my system. I'll be using the tutorial written by Eric Hameleers on his blog, alien pastures, but before I begin, there are some questions that I would like to ask.

For one thing, Eric's tutorial is designed for Slackware 14.1, in which PulseAudio hasn't already been integrated into the Slackware system like it has with 14.2. I'm wondering if there's anything special I will need to do to make sure that PulseAudio and Jack consistently use their default sound devices.

In particular, I want to keep PulseAudio as having the on-board sound chip for its default device, and want to set things up so that Jack always defaults to my Xonar DSX dedicated sound card. I know how to set the default device for Jack, but how do I ensure that PulseAudio stays away from the sound card itself?

Also, just how integrated into Slackware 14.2 is PulseAudio? I have a feeling that simply removing the pulseaudio and associated packages via pkgtool would break a lot of stuff, and I'm wondering how complicated it would be to disable and replace PulseAudio with Jack, and have everything rerouted into Jack that isn't Jack aware through Alsa?

Finally, are there any other special issues that come up when getting Jack to work on Slackware 14.2 that aren't covered in the tutorial by Eric Hameleers? Any advice and help would be appreciated.

Thank you very much for any and all help received!

Generally it depends on what you want to achieve. I actually haven't tried running jack alongside pulseaudio yet, but the infrastructure is available.

There is a intro post about it available here, which unfortunately misses the part on how to configure pulseaudio to only use one soundcard.

Apart from that I'm only aware of the last described method, where pulseaudio suspends itself while jack is running. The important part for that is that you need jack2, it won't work with jack-audio-connection-kit/, at least not how you would expect it to. Jack2 comes with a dbus interface that pulseaudio can interact with. To do that, however, pulseaudio needs a plugin, which is not available in the package shipped in 14.2. AFAIK there is no addon package yet providing said plugin, so the easiest/quickest way to get it is probably by recompiling pulseaudio after jack2 is installed.

Hope that gets you going in the right direction

Greetz DruidPeter -

I'm involved with the same task. What I've found is that there is a new version of Jack called Jack2 that, while lacking native Linux midi support, is designed to work with both Jack and Pulseaudio. I'm still struggling trying to stick with jack1 as I want that midi support, but I don't know if it's even possible anymore since I'd prefer to just remove PulseAudio altogether and have yet been able to do so cleanly.