[pulseaudio-discuss] a simple way to disable pa

[Achim Frase]

Am Freitag, den 19.12.2008, 11:46 -0500 schrieb Sean McNamara:
> Hi,
> 
> On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 10:59 AM, H.S. <hs.samix at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > This is regarding pulseaudio on Ubuntu Hardy (Ubuntu 8.04). I have
> > noticed that some of my friends, who have moved from Windows recently,
> > are encountering problems with pulseaudio and some video clips (online
> > as well, e.g. flash). After tyring to sort out these problem for the
> > past few weeks, I have decided just to disable to pulseaudio for these
> > guys for the time being.
> >
> > However, I am not sure how to disable pulseaudio while retaining all the
> > packages. The idea is to re-enable it in the future if needed.
> >
> > So far I have removed some pulseaudio packages and the /etc/asound.conf
> > file. The packages that are left are:
> > gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio libpulse-browse0 libpulse-mainloop-glib0
> > libpulse0 libpulsecore5 pulseaudio pulseaudio-esound-compat pulseaudio-utils
> >
> > I have also made all Preferences->Sound in Gnome to Alsa.
> >
> > But a pulseaudio process is still running.
> >
> > So, does anybody have any tip on how to just disable pulseaudio? I admit
> > I have not much knowledge about pulseaudio so I might be missing
> > something obvious.
> 
> pulseaudio is a daemon. It's a single binary. If you rename the
> binary, PulseAudio won't (can't!) run. Rather obvious now that I
> mention it, isn't it?
> 
> sudo mv /usr/bin/pulseaudio /usr/bin/pulseaudio-not
> 
> To get it back:
> 
> sudo mv /usr/bin/pulseaudio-not /usr/bin/pulseaudio
> (and reboot)
> 
> Now when the session tries to launch /usr/bin/pulseaudio, it will get
> a command not found. It's definitely not smart (or stupid) enough to
> go searching for the file named something else, so that's that. You
> won't even get any GUI errors from this.
> 
> Lacking PulseAudio, you probably won't be any more satisfied with the
> performance/features of ALSA's dmix (or worse, a complete lack of
> software mixing, if dmix is not enabled), but there are other venues
> where you can seek ALSA support now that pulseaudio is disabled --
> that's out of the scope of this ML :)
> 
> The weakest link of Ubuntu 8.04 is their poor and premature
> integration of PulseAudio -- and they're going to regret that for
> _seven_ years :) But if you are interested in actually solving the
> problem, upgrade PulseAudio and ALSA manually to their respective
> stable versions. To their credit, Jaunty Jackalope (what is to become
> Ubuntu 9.04) is integrating PulseAudio somewhat better than 8.04.
> Ubuntu 8.10, unfortunately, has almost identical PulseAudio packages
> to 8.04 -- despite the fact that there have been three stable releases
> of PulseAudio between 8.04 and 8.10.
> 
> Sean

Pulseaudio got some patches for ubuntu 8.10. Sure it isn't the latest
version but the situation has improved. The problems with flash are
gone. I think that was one of the main problems.

> >
> > Thanks.
> >
> > PS: I have asked on Ubuntu's list as well, but I am hoping people here
> > know more about the guts of pulseaudio so I might get different insights
> > here.
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> >
> > Please reply to this list only. I read this list on its corresponding
> > newsgroup on gmane.org. Replies sent to my email address are just
> > filtered to a folder in my mailbox and get periodically deleted without
> > ever having been read.