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Some questions that do 3d6 fire damage

Posted Aug 26, 2010 11:26 UTC (Thu) by Hknr (guest, #67789)
In reply to: Some questions that do 3d6 fire damage by Los__D
Parent article: Systemd and Fedora 14

Messing with configuration files to make stuff work
is exactly the way we like it in Linux land.

(Log in to post comments)

Posted Aug 26, 2010 11:35 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

Speak for yourself. I rather have stuff work without messing around with configuration files in my Linux land. Busy work makes no sense to me.

Some questions that do 3d6 fire damage

Posted Aug 26, 2010 12:52 UTC (Thu) by nicooo (guest, #69134) [Link]

With alsa you don't need to edit any files for a regular setup. If you want to do something out of the ordinary, using a config file is easier than some complicated gui.

Systemd gets it right by using ini instead of the xml that everything else hosted on freedesktop.org seems to use.

Some questions that do 3d6 fire damage

Posted Aug 26, 2010 12:18 UTC (Thu) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link]

My attitude to hand-editing configuration files is simple:

The system must allow it.
It should almost never be necessary.

The system should provide tools to make most-or-all commonplace configuration actions, and many less commonplace ones, achievable without using a text editor. If using a text editor to configure the system is necessary, at least one of the following statements is true:

The system's users have unusual requirements not easily predicted by the designers of the autoconfiguration mechanisms and "simplified" manual configuration tools.
The system's configuration has a level of essential complexity high enough that a text editor is the only useful way to configure the system at all, or low enough that you can't plausibly get it wrong in a bad way.
The system is broken.

Some questions that do 3d6 fire damage

Posted Aug 27, 2010 1:20 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

The other main argument is that hardware is now dynamic.

Here is very common hardware:
* USB headphones with microphones
* USB sound card
* Bluetooth heaphones

Notice how they are all dynamic?

So yeah. Alsa, by itself, can work really well if all you want to do is listen to Flac files over a static configuration... but it's shit if you want to do anything more complicated like:

* play more then one sound simultaneously (I'd like to see you program into your asoundrc file a audio mixer that does not suck)
* use your microphone
* use audio input with more then one application
* Use X11 applications over a network that have audio
* use a USB docking station for your laptop
* use your bluetooth headset
* Be able to switch your bluetooth headset between stereo sound and telephone modes
* configure your laptop's audio output (on the fly) between:
- off
- stereo audio with input
- 4 speaker surround sound
- stereo audio with digital output
- digital output with digital input
* Play your game's audio out through the speakers and then chat with people on your usb headset

And a bunch of other crap people using other OSes take for granted but is nearly impossible to do in Linux with any sort of sanity and when it does works it only works in extremely static and carefully maintained configuration.

And, no, switching to OSS is not going to help any since OSS, even in the newest versions, is less capable and more of a pain in the ass to configure then Alsa is... OH it uses software mixing by default, unlike ancient versions of Alsa. One problem solved and sixty thousand more to go.

Some questions that do 3d6 fire damage

Posted Sep 6, 2010 16:41 UTC (Mon) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]

I'm sure those things would be lovely, if there was more than 50% chance that the piece of shit would produce any fucking sound at all.

Some questions that do 3d6 fire damage

Posted Sep 6, 2010 17:10 UTC (Mon) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

I am sure there is 98.7 % chance of sound. Much better than ALSA's 76.5% :-)

Some questions that do 3d6 fire damage

Posted Aug 26, 2010 21:20 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

And just how much documentation is there for asound.conf? Sod all useful that I can find, that's how much. There's even a Lisp interpreter in there somewhere, although I'm not sure where. I suspect I'll have to grovel through the source code to figure out the syntax, and life is just too damn short.

I googled for a stanza to force everything through PulseAudio (first hit: pulseaudio.org's Perfect Setup page) and left it at that.

Some questions that do 3d6 fire damage

Posted Aug 26, 2010 21:39 UTC (Thu) by sfeam (subscriber, #2841) [Link]

And on that Perfect Setup page you will find the following advice:

KDE 4 uses Phonon as the main audio interface. The Xine backend of Phonon should eventually use PulseAudio automatically, but at the time of writing the pulse plugin for Xine is too unreliable, so it's disabled by default. While waiting for that to get better, Phonon uses Alsa. Therefore, to get Phonon to use PulseAudio, you have to edit your ~/.asoundrc or /etc/asound.conf. However, the normal .asoundrc modifications aren't enough. See #232 (specifically the workaround part). New progress is being made with KDE 4 and Phonon all the time. Please refer to the KDE wiki page for further information and setup instuctions.

... which matches my experience. Getting PA to work with KDE4 is somewhere on the spectrum from painful to impossible. And it doesn't get you away from dealing with the ALSA configuration.