SlackwareThis Forum is for the discussion of Slackware Linux.
Notices
Welcome to LinuxQuestions.org, a friendly and active Linux Community.
You are currently viewing LQ as a guest. By joining our community you will have the ability to post topics, receive our newsletter, use the advanced search, subscribe to threads and access many other special features. Registration is quick, simple and absolutely free. Join our community today!
Note that registered members see fewer ads, and ContentLink is completely disabled once you log in.
If you have any problems with the registration process or your account login, please contact us. If you need to reset your password, click here.
Having a problem logging in? Please visit this page to clear all LQ-related cookies.
Get a virtual cloud desktop with the Linux distro that you want in less than five minutes with Shells! With over 10 pre-installed distros to choose from, the worry-free installation life is here! Whether you are a digital nomad or just looking for flexibility, Shells can put your Linux machine on the device that you want to use.
Exclusive for LQ members, get up to 45% off per month. Click here for more info.
After working with quite a bit of third party software (as in, not in the Slackware repository), I have found that just keeping PA on the system less of a hassle.
I run JACK with ALSA and use apulse to divert the few applications out there that have a conniption when it's not there. I don't like it, but keeping up with the pure alsa flavor and everything having -DUSE_PULSEAUDIO seemingly as the default now, I chose the path of less struggle.
Being more militant is better to banish the scourge, but, for the time being, I don't care enough. This might change, it's still awful in my eyes (or ears) after all.
Didier. Do you consider noise or power consumption as "someone just don't like"? Having PulseAudio somehow fucks up everything so that I cannot just use ALSA. I have chosen default card instead of piping to Pulse by default and I can see it in alsamixer. But sometimg other than moc cannot play sounds. These problems do not appear if you simply do not have Pulse.
I marked the thread 'solved' too early. I haven't figured out how to go pure alsa still.
Last edited by unInstance; 01-14-2020 at 12:40 PM.
We don't need to get into a battle on the benefits or downsides of pulseaudio. The fact is, Pat provides the pure-alsa-system, so some users are bound to use it, and we don't need to get into philosophical debates on pulseaudio every time it comes up.
What do you mean it does not work? What is the problem you're running into? We've had a few forum members use this to get their system pulse free, so if something recent has changed and made those instructions ineffective, we should try and address it.
We don't need to get into a battle on the benefits or downsides of pulseaudio. The fact is, Pat provides the pure-alsa-system, so some users are bound to use it, and we don't need to get into philosophical debates on pulseaudio every time it comes up.
What do you mean it does not work? What is the problem you're running into? We've had a few forum members use this to get their system pulse free, so if something recent has changed and made those instructions ineffective, we should try and address it.
I follower all the linked guide;
mocp tells
Code:
Running the server...
Trying ALSA...
ALSA lib pcm_dmix.c:1089:(snd_pcm_dmix_open) unable to open slave
Trying OSS...
FATAL_ERROR: No valid sound driver!
FATAL_ERROR: Server exited!
I fixed it by selecting PCH as a default card instead of HDMI
Code:
# /etc/asound.conf
pcm.!default {
type hw
card 1
}
ctl.!default {
type hw
card 1
}
mpv tells
Code:
mpv: error while loading shared libraries: libpulse.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
I do not know how to fix this.
Firefox doesn't play sounds too.
EDIT: I rebuilt mpv and it works, but what to do with firefox?
Last edited by unInstance; 01-14-2020 at 01:52 PM.
Running the server...
Trying ALSA...
ALSA lib pcm_dmix.c:1089:(snd_pcm_dmix_open) unable to open slave
Trying OSS...
FATAL_ERROR: No valid sound driver!
FATAL_ERROR: Server exited!
I fixed it by selecting PCH as a default card instead of HDMI
Code:
# /etc/asound.conf
pcm.!default {
type hw
card 1
}
ctl.!default {
type hw
card 1
}
This is pretty standard with any alsa setup and is one of the things that pulse makes easier... selecting which audio device you want it to output. Alsa users have had to make those modifications for years if the system defaulted to a different audio device than what you use. This has nothing to do with pulse.
Quote:
Originally Posted by unInstance
mpv tells
Code:
mpv: error while loading shared libraries: libpulse.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
I do not know how to fix this.
EDIT: I rebuilt mpv and it works
As you found, any 3rd-party applications you have that were built on a system with pulse will need to be recompiled. Pat should have all the system packages rebuilt in that folder, so you'd only need to worry about 3rd-party stuff.
Quote:
Originally Posted by unInstance
Firefox doesn't play sounds too.
but what to do with firefox? Just reinstall with slackpkg?
If you're using the system firefox (the one provided by Slackware), it should have alsa support out of the box, but if you download the prebuilt binary from Mozilla, they do not have alsa support and rely on pulseaudio.
If you are using the system firefox, many times you need to install additional software to get firefox to work properly with certain types of media, but it's been long enough, I don't know what that is. Can you see if open formats are able to play in Firefox? This may point to whether your problem is related to missing codecs or a system issue. This page has both closed (mp4) and open (ogg and webm) formats available. Try seeing if any of those work.
If you are using the system firefox, many times you need to install additional software to get firefox to work properly with certain types of media, but it's been long enough, I don't know what that is. Can you see if open formats are able to play in Firefox? This may point to whether your problem is related to missing codecs or a system issue. This page has both closed (mp4) and open (ogg and webm) formats available. Try seeing if any of those work.
If you are using the system firefox, many times you need to install additional software to get firefox to work properly with certain types of media, but it's been long enough, I don't know what that is. Can you see if open formats are able to play in Firefox? This may point to whether your problem is related to missing codecs or a system issue. This page has both closed (mp4) and open (ogg and webm) formats available. Try seeing if any of those work.
One more question is how do I make slackpkg install _alsa versions of software because now "slackpkg upgrade-all" wants to non alsa versions of ffmeg, mplayer and so on...
Sound does not play in either of these formats. I use out of the box firefox.
Do you get any errors if you run firefox through the commandline?
Quote:
Originally Posted by unInstance
One more question is how do I make slackpkg install _alsa versions of software because now "slackpkg upgrade-all" wants to non alsa versions of ffmeg, mplayer and so on...
You'll want edit your /etc/slackpkg/slackpkg.conf file to set the priority. Move "extra" so it's before %PKGMAIN instead of after.
Reading through some bug reports online, it looks like it might be a limitation of Firefox's sandboxing not working well with alsa (alsa support in firefox is not maintained anymore), and if you disable the sandbox, it might fix the audio.
Reading through some bug reports online, it looks like it might be a limitation of Firefox's sandboxing not working well with alsa (alsa support in firefox is not maintained anymore), and if you disable the sandbox, it might fix the audio.
Unfortunately, this is beyond my knowledge. I don't use Firefox, I'm not on -current, and I don't run a pure-alsa system. Hopefully someone with a bit more knowledge/experience can pop in and provide some guidance.
Unfortunately, this is beyond my knowledge. I don't use Firefox, I'm not on -current, and I don't run a pure-alsa system. Hopefully someone with a bit more knowledge/experience can pop in and provide some guidance.
Thanks a lot. I don't need sound in web browser. I am for static web.
Instead of YouTube web player for instance I use mpv + youtube-dl; it gives me good caching, reduces battery/resources consumption, fine keyboard control and I can get rid of horrible codecs such as VP9.
We don't need to get into a battle on the benefits or downsides of pulseaudio. The fact is, Pat provides the pure-alsa-system, so some users are bound to use it, and we don't need to get into philosophical debates on pulseaudio every time it comes up.
I think we do when someone assumes anyone who doesn't choose to just cave in is just being silly, lazy, or both. Didier points out the latency issue can be mitigated, but ignores that mitigation is nowhere near to "equal to" the low latency of Pure Alsa. That's perfectly understandable for those to whom such things don't matter, but it is still myopic to imagine everyone should be happy with what they think is "good enough" when better alternatives are available.
Quote:
Originally Posted by bassmadrigal
What do you mean it does not work? What is the problem you're running into? We've had a few forum members use this to get their system pulse free, so if something recent has changed and made those instructions ineffective, we should try and address it.
Patrick's script works a treat on -Current. It does not on 14.2 and I suspect there may be some later issues in the future because Pulse, as I mentioned, makes no room for "optional", for the competition. Who knows how long we can get compatible versions of several important and fundamental services and libraries that work with just ALSA. Now I haven't used OSS in many years but iirc, especially since the kernel still has OSS code in it, switching between ALSA and OSS, at least back then, was not a major overhaul. Pulse does not play nice with others. It demands compliance. Period. Removing Pulse from 14.2 was a royal PITA and I have to accept a few things in KDE don't work because those versions conflict with what's in 14.2, so the whole process was primarily trial and error.
In fact that seems to be part of it's appeal to those like Mozilla devs who are grateful they don't have to even consider audio anymore, even if currently that only means having one or two checkboxes checked, at no penalty to anything else. There is the Firefox-fuckPA project for a downloadable blob or if you have a complete Rust install and a few other libraries apparently you can compile Firefox with those two checkboxes checked... OR for a little while longer anyway ESR versions work.
Anyway when 15, or whatever the next Official Release will be called, comes out I will start out as Pure ALSA but I do suspect at some point I will have to resort to having Pulse and using something like apulse, which although that's an extra step, I will gladly do rather than deal with the penalties of Pulse. It is, after all, a whole other additional software layer to what needs to be as simple and direct as possible.
To each their own, but I found using ALSA to deal with sound sinks that come and go to be such a horrendous pain in the ass that I stopped trying to deal with it. After all, there's a reason that ESD and aRts came into being.
LinuxQuestions.org is looking for people interested in writing
Editorials, Articles, Reviews, and more. If you'd like to contribute
content, let us know.