Fedora + KDE + Sound Apps

[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