Fedora + KDE + Sound Apps

[n2ize]

After installation of Fedora 11 which included migration from KDE3 to KDE4 everything was working fine and all of a sudden all the KDE sound apps stopped working. Anytime a KDE app would try to play a sound it would crash and send a Signal 6 (SIGABRT). I examined the backtrace and alkl I could gather was that the phoneon xine backend was balking somewhere and not playing nice. Only problem is that the xine backend was working fine and I couldn;t see any reason for it to suddenly fail after it had been working fine. But there was nothing I could do to get it to work. So I switched from the xine backend to the "gstreamer-phoneon" backend and all of a sudden it worked. So at least my kde sounds work via gstreamer but I still cannot figure out what the hack happened with xine. The way in which sound is handled in KDE has changed since KDE3 and I am not entirely familiar with the new sound system.

Linux is great but it's still somewhat of a headache when it comes to sound.

[W2NAP]

Linux is great but it's still somewhat of a headache when it comes to sound.

pulse audio has given me nothing but problems on this tower with sound.... and kubuntu sound is compleatly dead on this tower. why? i still never figured it out

[n2ize]

Linux is great but it's still somewhat of a headache when it comes to sound.

pulse audio has given me nothing but problems on this tower with sound.... and kubuntu sound is compleatly dead on this tower. why? i still never figured it out

Ity seems like the brunt of the problems have to do with either the way the various apps play with the various backends or, more likely, the way the backends (i.e. xine, gstreamer, etc.) are playing with the various sound devices and the Linux kernel. Since I'm not a pro when it comes to kernel issues the backtrace's still look like Greek to me. But I'm learning how to decipher some of the more basic kernel issues...albeit slowly...veeery slowly. :mrgreen:


What is really weird here is that pulseaudio WAS working and then all of a sudden out of nowhere I get a message saying, "pulseaudio not working should KDE ignore pulseaudio".. Huh ?? To make it more bizarre the sudden failure didn't coincide with any upgrades, reconfiguration or with the installation of any new software. It's like one minute it's playing ball and the next minute it's out on strike.

I tried asking around on the "redhat-install-list" but everyone there scratched their heads and looked at me like I was talking in Chinese. I'm tempted to sign on to the "fedora-list" and ask around on there. Seems that some of the folks over there are avid KDE fans.

From what little info I gathered there were some new things added in that broke some of the sound handling in KDE. Originally I was able to listen to an mp3, watch a DVD and run a flash video and all sounds would play simultaneously via pulseaudio...similar to the way it used to be handled via "artsd" in the older KDE. But artsd sucked (too many issues) and it was supposed to be replaced with something better. Unfortunately it seems like it's the new sound function (under KDE) is still chock full o bugs.

Well, at least I have sound. I am hoping things will improve over the next few upgrades.

[W2NAP]

i have found KDE 4 to be buggy as hell. (i still prefeer 3.5.10 KDE)

pluse audio i think was a giant mistake IMO i had to totally get away from kubuntu due to it not playing nice to my system... fedora on this tower dont play nice ether. sad part is this tower is alot of generic crap (sound vid, ect) so it should work ok.

i played around earlier...

Fedora 11. GNONE/KDE. both hard lockup at the install.

Kubuntu 9.04 w/ KDE4 works. the plasmas (widgets) give me hell (network manager plasma is a bitch) plus pulse audio loves to think digital needs to be used (as it can never use analog) so i end up with no sound.

Ubuntu 9.04 w/ gnome no sound untill i apply the latest kernel... but yes can drop out at any moment. and then im boned having to restart god knows how many times (last time took 37 reboots to get sound back) till i get sound back. plus Firefox 3.5 has a issue and loves to cause a lockup forcing me into a hard reboot

Debian (5) lenny. with KDE 3.5 works perfect no sound issues just awesome

now i can take the same crap and install on the laptop. Fedora works decent but a tad bit sluggish with KDE4 - no real sound issues., kubuntu same with KDE4 (sluggish) sometimes a pulse audio sound issue, Ubuntu w/ gnome. ok. sometimes a minor sound issue. firefox issue not seen on laptop like the tower. debian lenny, w/ kde 3.5 works perfect no problems at all.


only thing i can think of, is there is some major issues with pulse audio still (and just needs to be scrapped just use alsa for god sake at least it fucking worked fine) and the issues seem to be hardware related. KDE4 still is buggy so i still prefer 3.5 over 4, and firefox 3.5 has some major issues (memleak?) and possible flash-player -> pulse audio problem? causing lockups?

[n2ize]

I hear ya. As usual getting sound to work properly under Linux is a nightmare. Add to that the fact that I have 2 sound cards in my machine (because I do some weird things with audio processing) and all the quirky backends that Qt/KDE is using for sound these days and the nightmare quickly grows unmanageable. Miraculously though the sound is working here when and where I want it...most of the time.

The problem I am having is unpredictablity. What works now may not wiork at all next time If I upgrade a few packages or change some minor configurations it may all vanish and require troubleshooting and / or reconfiguration.

Case and point. Today I set up my virtual desktop so I can access from remote systems. It worked but guess what ? When I came back to the system console KDE took forever to start up, my panel configurations changed, and, my sound stopped working entirely. It took a couple of reboots and playing with the sound config panels to get it back again. Is this what I am going to have to go through each time I run on a remote desktop ? Unnacceptable. I hope not. If worst comes to worst I'll make sure I'm running GNOME when I am running via a remote desktop.

There are some fixes to the 'pulseaudio" system that I'm looking into. Hopefully they'll resolve the sound issues once and for all. In general the system is great , it has awesome features, it runs multimedia apps just fine, etc. But there are some issues with sound that simply need to be fixed once and for all. As far as KDE4 goes I suspect some of the issues lie within the underlying Qt-4.0 libraries and/or the way they have been implemented. At Qt4/KDE4 matures and the developers become more proficient I am sure the bugs will be ironed out and things will run smooth. KDE4 actually improved a lot from the first time I tried it under fedora 9 (Sulphur). Under Fedora 9 and prior to the first few bug-fixes KDE was so buggy it was literally unusable. I don;t think it even had any configuration tools, and the few it had barely worked.

Bear in mind, Fedora is the proving ground for what eventually goes into RHEL. As for us fedora users, we're the guinea pigs, or should I say, we're the patsy's. :mrgreen: We generate the bug reports.

[W4GPL]

Pulseaudio will eventually be the greatest thing since sliced bread, but right now it's still a work in progress. I monitor PA's commit logs and they still constantly reworking some of the core features. I really like the virtual monitor stuff they have and the network streaming, but both eat up a bunch of CPU cycles -- though it improved with kernel-2.6.30.5-28.rc2.fc11 which I got from the development tree.

Wish I could offer you some advice with KDE, I haven't used KDE in years and I have no earthly idea how their sound system differs from Gnome. Are they still using Arts or have they compiled everything against PA? One thing I noticed if you're using the Alsa hook, you have to make sure your Alsa mixer is turned up, as well as Pulse. E.g.: 'alsamixer -c0' ; 'alsamixer -D pulse' from the console.

Also, if you did an upgrade from a previous version of Fedora, you might want to do a verify on the alsa-utils & alsa-plugins-pulseaudio packages. rpm -V alsa-utils ; rpm -V alsa-plugins-pulseaudio

[n2ize]

KDE is no longer using artsd (apparently) and they are using PA... KDE 4 is extremely buggy, almost to the point of being unusable. It's extremely unpredictable, it will run great for hours, days, then crash/freeze 6 times in a row. Likewise, sound under KDE is similarly nightmarish, extremely unpredictable, and haunted by evil demons.

For regular desktop users I would recommend downgrading to KDE 3 until KDE 4 is ready for the desktop. It is not ready for prime time yet.

[N2CHX]

I gave up on KDE years ago. Gnome and PulseAudio have their issues, but KDE was just a royal PITA.

[n2ize]

I gave up on KDE years ago. Gnome and PulseAudio have their issues, but KDE was just a royal PITA.

KDE3 was pretty stable and very reliable. I was using it for years. KDE4 has some bugs that will drive you crazy at times. Other times it works nicely. I just upgraded it so hopefully the upgrade will fix some of the bugs. I pioneered KDE4 when it first came included in the original spin of Fedora 9. Wow... want to talk buggy... It was almost totally unconfigurable and unusable at that time. But, the very next upgrade fixed a lot of the problems. I suspect that as KDE4 matures it will reach the same, or better, level of stability as KDE3.

[W4GPL]

For regular desktop users I would recommend downgrading to KDE 3 until KDE 4 is ready for the desktop. It is not ready for prime time yet.Or just use Gnome. ;)

[n2ize]

For regular desktop users I would recommend downgrading to KDE 3 until KDE 4 is ready for the desktop. It is not ready for prime time yet.Or just use Gnome. ;)

True, but I'm speaking mainly of die hard KDE'ers like myself.

[n2ize]

Well, they seemed to fix a few things. For one my weather applet keeps it's configuration now... before the upgrade it lost the config everytime you logged out and logged back in. Some of the desktop widgets seem to be working and some of the config tools and interfaces seem a bit tighter. Unfortunately the screen savers still don't work... yes they are there and they have some really awesome screen savers but unfortunately they never come on automatically, even when configured to do so.

[N2CHX]

Well, they seemed to fix a few things. For one my weather applet keeps it's configuration now... before the upgrade it lost the config everytime you logged out and logged back in. Some of the desktop widgets seem to be working and some of the config tools and interfaces seem a bit tighter. Unfortunately the screen savers still don't work... yes they are there and they have some really awesome screen savers but unfortunately they never come on automatically, even when configured to do so.

Wow. I appreciate your dedication but with that much dysfunction why stick with it? Even my kids can use Gnome. I'd hate to hear how much they'd groan at me if they had all the problems with their computers that it seems KDE still has.

[n2ize]

Well, they seemed to fix a few things. For one my weather applet keeps it's configuration now... before the upgrade it lost the config everytime you logged out and logged back in. Some of the desktop widgets seem to be working and some of the config tools and interfaces seem a bit tighter. Unfortunately the screen savers still don't work... yes they are there and they have some really awesome screen savers but unfortunately they never come on automatically, even when configured to do so.

Wow. I appreciate your dedication but with that much dysfunction why stick with it? Even my kids can use Gnome. I'd hate to hear how much they'd groan at me if they had all the problems with their computers that it seems KDE still has.

I prefer the look and feel and flexibility of KDE. Plus, despite it's growing pains, there are just some things it does better. Plus I am also quite familiar with Qt which is essentially the SDK that KDE is built on. Thus I can decipher error messages in KDE better than other systems.

Besides, despite the current issues with KDE it is still light years ahead of the GUI interfaces that I had to deal with when I started with Linux way back in the early 90's.

[W2NAP]

i prefeer KDE over gnome

if i had a dvd drive on the tower id put debian on the tower.. but just cd drive and since i have to use ndiswrapper to get the wifi to work (which is my only way to connect to the net) and its a bitch going thu finding all the dependancys for ndiswrapper in debian with no net connection (and not haveing a shit ton of cd's )

[N2CHX]

Wow. I write code, as in I have a lot of software I have written and even sold -- and some of you are WAY beyond my level of geek. For Christ's sake I even have a hardware/software system that won an industry award and you're STILL more geeky than me. :snicker:

[n2ize]

Wow. I write code, as in I have a lot of software I have written and even sold -- and some of you are WAY beyond my level of geek. For Christ's sake I even have a hardware/software system that won an industry award and you're STILL more geeky than me. :snicker:

I don't do much programming these days. When I do write code I mostly write in Lisp or Perl. Once in while I might write in C or a little bit in Assembly. For GUI programming I mainly use Qt/C++.

[W2NAP]

i try not to write code it gives me a headache.. i have been known to send code once and awhile :P

[n2ize]

Okay, getting back to the subject at hand. I flushed the contents of my old .qt and .kde config directories. Then I restarted KDE to let the rebuild from scratch. So far KDE seems to be behaving. Perhaps it was balking at some of my old configuration directives. We'll see how things go, So far even my screensavers are working properly now.

Pulseaudio is awesome. I can open any audio app and it will play... simulataneously with other apps if need be. No fighting for a sound card. I think Pulseaudio has great promise and may be the answer to Linux's sound woes. Now I just gotta familiarize myself with Qt 4.0 and phoneon.

One additional note... Although it is running much better since I did the upgrades and cleaned out the old kde configs it still crashed hard on me while I was playing a flash video in Firefox. But it was a random crash, it's been fine since. If might even be related to a bug in Adobe's flash plugin.

[n2ize]

i prefeer KDE over gnome

if i had a dvd drive on the tower id put debian on the tower.. but just cd drive and since i have to use ndiswrapper to get the wifi to work (which is my only way to connect to the net) and its a bitch going thu finding all the dependancys for ndiswrapper in debian with no net connection (and not haveing a shit ton of cd's )

I know whaere your coming from. I was lucky. When I had to set up ndiswrapper on a laptop I was fortunate to be able to plug into my wired ethernet. As it turns out the upper floor of the house is on hard wired ethernet. The lower floor is on wifi.

[W2NAP]

i prefeer KDE over gnome

if i had a dvd drive on the tower id put debian on the tower.. but just cd drive and since i have to use ndiswrapper to get the wifi to work (which is my only way to connect to the net) and its a bitch going thu finding all the dependancys for ndiswrapper in debian with no net connection (and not haveing a shit ton of cd's )

I know whaere your coming from. I was lucky. When I had to set up ndiswrapper on a laptop I was fortunate to be able to plug into my wired ethernet. As it turns out the upper floor of the house is on hard wired ethernet. The lower floor is on wifi.

yea. id much rather be using debian. its just a pain in the ass to take the tower apart take it to someone who has a hardwire connection just to install the crap.

fixing to do a experiment, going to try and install KDE 3.5 on ubuntu 9.10 Alpha

[n2ize]

Well I seem to have pulseaudio working reasonably well and relatively stable. I basically followed the procedure described here.

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=225660

In addition I had to remove my old KDE configs and start fresh.

KDE seems to be playing very nicely with pulseaudio now. All my sound apps are working now, individually, concurrently, and simultaneously. I think pulseaudio is going to be the way of the future. It still needs some refinement but I think ultimately it will be the answer to sound on Linux that we've been waitiong for.

[n2ize]

Ok here's the latest. Although KDE 4 is performing much better now its still crashing hard every now and then... hard to the point where the only way out is to do a hard reboot i.e. power off then back on, of the entire machine. One of the things I always prided myself on is that, unlike a certain OS from Redmond, Linux could run for weeks on end with nary a crash. Unfortunately, with KDE 4 such no longer seems to be the case.

No, I'm not going to give up on KDE4 yet. The way I see it is that although it's still buggy it is undergoing it's "growing pains" and needs to mature into something robust and STABLE. KDE is already quite robust, so at this point stability is the principal goal. There are many things that I do like about KDE 4. I don;t want to write it off just yet and, with luck I'll hopefully never have to write it off.

What I will do is make sure I am generating as much debugging info as possible so as to try and determine what is the cause of these hard, and seemingly random, hard crashes. I doubt it is a hardware issue as many people seem to be reproducing the exact same problems. In the course of debugging I hope to also generate as much debugging info as possible that I can forward to the developers. I may even try a few things on my own, i.e. editing the source, recompiling, etc.

Let me add that pulseaudio seems to be working perfectly now. I am quite impressed and, as long as it continues as is it is a big improvement over KDE + arts. Not that artsd was bad but it was finicky and somewhat lacking. Pulseaudio is much more robust and integrates sound far better than anything I've seen on a Linux platform to date... although I have had some great results with "jackd". "jack" is still great for piping audio around to specific apps and hardware. I still plan to use jack for audio processing projects..

[W2NAP]

well i got it rolling

Ubuntu 9.04 w/ KDE 3.5 so far so good (left gnome as a failsafe just incase something foobars)

[n2ize]

well i got it rolling

Ubuntu 9.04 w/ KDE 3.5 so far so good (left gnome as a failsafe just incase something foobars)

Sounds good. KDE 3.5 should be pretty stable. Do you plan to do any more experimenting with KDE 4 though ? I decided to stick with KDE 4 for now. I seem to have it running well now and I'm hoping the remaining bugs will be ironed out over the next couple of upgrades.

[W2NAP]

well i got it rolling

Ubuntu 9.04 w/ KDE 3.5 so far so good (left gnome as a failsafe just incase something foobars)

Sounds good. KDE 3.5 should be pretty stable. Do you plan to do any more experimenting with KDE 4 though ? I decided to stick with KDE 4 for now. I seem to have it running well now and I'm hoping the remaining bugs will be ironed out over the next couple of upgrades.

prob not for awhile. i checked it out when ubuntu added it in the repos didnt like it that much. if they got rid of the plasma (widgets) crap it would prob be ok. IMO KDE4 is to "vista'ish" (which i have seen alot of people complain about the plasma crap)

as far as stability you know its finally stable when its in debian main "stable" repo lol.

[n2ize]

Just an update. After a few system updates Fedora 11 + KDE4 + Pulseaudio is behaving nicely. Running smooth, so far no crashes, sound is working great, etc. Much more stable and functional than when I first installed.

All I can say is that if you're running KDE4 and/or Pulseaudio keep applying those updates.

[W4GPL]

All I can say is that if you're running KDE4 and/or Pulseaudio keep applying those updates.Yeah, you can't run a bleeding edge operating system without applying those bandaids often. :) I have 3 Fedora machines, my desktop has an older SoundBlaster Live PCI card and is using PulseAudio without a hitch, as it my laptop that has an Intel chipset (snd-hda-intel). My "audio box" -- stuff I do mixing and recording on, using 4+ soundcards is still using Alsa exclusive with dmix/dsnoop. PulseAudio makes a lot of promises in terms of mixing & network support, but they fall short -- very very short.

[n2ize]

All I can say is that if you're running KDE4 and/or Pulseaudio keep applying those updates.Yeah, you can't run a bleeding edge operating system without applying those bandaids often. :) I have 3 Fedora machines, my desktop has an older SoundBlaster Live PCI card and is using PulseAudio without a hitch, as it my laptop that has an Intel chipset (snd-hda-intel). My "audio box" -- stuff I do mixing and recording on, using 4+ soundcards is still using Alsa exclusive with dmix/dsnoop. PulseAudio makes a lot of promises in terms of mixing & network support, but they fall short -- very very short.

I think Pulseaudio needs some time to mature. It still has growing pains to deal with. It looks promising though. I am using one soundcard in most of my systems but, I plan to install 2 sound cards into one of my systems for some audiop processing. It will be a first for my using such a configuration under Pulseaudio. My needs are not that intense. Some digital processing, i.e. equalization, compression, limiting, mixing, digital delay, phase shifting, bandpass filtering etc.

[W2NAP]

All I can say is that if you're running KDE4 and/or Pulseaudio keep applying those updates.Yeah, you can't run a bleeding edge operating system without applying those bandaids often. :) I have 3 Fedora machines, my desktop has an older SoundBlaster Live PCI card and is using PulseAudio without a hitch, as it my laptop that has an Intel chipset (snd-hda-intel). My "audio box" -- stuff I do mixing and recording on, using 4+ soundcards is still using Alsa exclusive with dmix/dsnoop. PulseAudio makes a lot of promises in terms of mixing & network support, but they fall short -- very very short.

I think Pulseaudio needs some time to mature. It still has growing pains to deal with. It looks promising though. I am using one soundcard in most of my systems but, I plan to install 2 sound cards into one of my systems for some audiop processing. It will be a first for my using such a configuration under Pulseaudio. My needs are not that intense. Some digital processing, i.e. equalization, compression, limiting, mixing, digital delay, phase shifting, bandpass filtering etc.

wish they would get pulse figured out. its been such a pain in the ass for me

[n2ize]

All I can say is that if you're running KDE4 and/or Pulseaudio keep applying those updates.Yeah, you can't run a bleeding edge operating system without applying those bandaids often. :) I have 3 Fedora machines, my desktop has an older SoundBlaster Live PCI card and is using PulseAudio without a hitch, as it my laptop that has an Intel chipset (snd-hda-intel). My "audio box" -- stuff I do mixing and recording on, using 4+ soundcards is still using Alsa exclusive with dmix/dsnoop. PulseAudio makes a lot of promises in terms of mixing & network support, but they fall short -- very very short.

I think Pulseaudio needs some time to mature. It still has growing pains to deal with. It looks promising though. I am using one soundcard in most of my systems but, I plan to install 2 sound cards into one of my systems for some audiop processing. It will be a first for my using such a configuration under Pulseaudio. My needs are not that intense. Some digital processing, i.e. equalization, compression, limiting, mixing, digital delay, phase shifting, bandpass filtering etc.

wish they would get pulse figured out. its been such a pain in the ass for me

I think they will. It's just gonna be a matter of time. it's gotta mature.