Various questions regarding software and audio issues
 

Hello,

As a foreword, I would like to state that, while I have past experience with Linux, the distributions I have chosen in the past have been somewhat babied as far as drivers and packages extend. As such, Slackware is the first OS to truly force me to understand some of the fundamental concepts behind Linux.

The following is all semi-related, and I hope some of you will aid me in understanding it.

To begin, my sound card, an ASUS Xonar DG, does not have a output volume control for the headphone jack in alsamixer. Sound functions properly for the most part (I'll get to the rest later), but obviously it's at full volume all the time, and is therefore absolutely ear piercing. Through the archive of this forum, Google, and Slackbuilds.org, I have managed to install pulseaudio in an effort to add a volume control with the server to save my poor ears and headphones. Unfortunately, that's were my first problem starts to carry over unto the second.

I've come to the point where I can actually function without a package manager, in that I know how to make and build without following tutorial directions now. Slackbuilds certainly make the whole process ten times easier above that, to say the least. However, there is one thing I would like to inquire about. To put it simply: How in the hell do you deal with all these dependencies, and dependencies of dependencies, and so on?

It started when I tried building pavucontrol to define the volume for pulseaudio. It told me I required gtkmm and some other ish (that I cannot presently recall). As I would proceed with an attempt to build and install the dependencies, it would require more dependencies, and pretty soon I had myself a chain of dependencies too long for me to bother following. Is this the only way to deal with them without a package manager like pacman, yaourt apt-get, yum? Or is there some trick to resolving and grabbing dependencies in a faster way?

And lastly, though this may or may not have to do anything, browser sound does not work in the least. This has me absolutely perplexed.

Thanks in advance for any help I may receive. In addition, I'd like to point out that I am exhausted from trying to figure this out on my own, and am about to retire for the evening, in case I do not respond for approximately nine hours.

-Reacon

Unfortunately that is the only way when running Slackware. IMHO it is the weak link in the chain, but is never likely to change so those of us who have on various occasions tried to inject some sense and argued for dependency resolution into the distro invariably end up getting less than favourable responses from the fan base. To the point where it just wears you down so you tend not to bother any more.
But, we still stick with it as the alternatives, with their obvious advantages in this area, don't necessarily fulfill our desire to control our own system.

Now if only there was a way, but with a choice to switch it on or off to suit. Oh well, one can dream!

Sorry I have no real help for you on your sound issue. Good luck with your 'dependency hell'

Hello, Reacon,
Both pulseaudio and pavucontrol are available in slackbuilds. All the dependencies a package requires are listed. So you have to make sure you know all of them before you start building your target package. What I personally do is, first list all dependencies and dependencies of dependencies I need. This is not at all so awful and time-consuming as it sounds if you do it BEFORE the build starts. In the general case it is just a tree structure of packages which one can write down a sheet of paper or in a file within 5 minutes. When I have the list of dependencies, I download them together with their build scripts, and then I just run a script that automates the sequential building and installing each package from my list. Alternatively one could check whether sbopkg does not already provide a build queue for the package one wishes. This will save you even the work of resolving dependencies.

Have you installed the flash-player plugin?

I hadn't a clue something like sbopkg existed! Thank you much for the suggestion.

Yes, and HTML5 Youtube has the same problem.

@Vdemuth: I appreciate the response regardless.


I'll update again when I have had the time to tinker with it a little more. Thanks again for the replies.

Apparently this is a hardware issue. From http://www.alsa-project.org/main/ind...ix:Vendor-Asus
I am not so sure about the comment to use PulseAudio. If you have a successful solution after building and installing PulseAudio, then all is well and good. I do wonder though whether a softvol solution would also have worked. http://alsa.opensrc.org/How_to_use_s..._master_volume