[pulseaudio-discuss] pulseaudio automatic startup

[Colin Guthrie]

Lennart Poettering wrote:
> On Wed, 13.02.08 18:34, Colin Guthrie (gmane at colin.guthr.ie) wrote:
> 
>> Lennart Poettering wrote:
>>> Hmm, I wonder if there are any drawbacks of this way to start PA. Does
>>> gnome-session still upload the samples correctly if it doesn't start
>>> esd/PA by itself? It has been a while since I last had a look on the
>>> g-s source code.
>>>
>>> If that's not a problem, than I might do a similar change on Fedora, too.
>> Not 100% sure about that one. I certainly get my login sound but I have
>> been a little confused about not seeing samples in the cache....
>> although this is no doubt due to me restarting pulseaudio since logging
>> in (I generally don't log out/in much provided my suspend is behaving..).
>>
>> I'll let you know.
>>
>> One other thing for fedora package (not sure if it applies) is ESD
>> autospawn. I've had to ship a /etc/esd.conf with "auto_spawn=0" in it
>> otherwise libesound will try to run /usr/bin/esd by default (which is
>> obviously symlinked to esdcompat). Alternative would be to hack
>> libesound to make no_autospawn default to 1 but somehow the config file
>> seemed less hacky and didn't change the defined behaviour of
>> libesound.
> 
> Autospawning = evil. Don't do it.

I'm trying not to :) The mistake I made was not including an esd.conf
file to stop libesound from doing it by default :)

> Hmm, when I hacked the auto-spawning code I made sure that it worked
> event for the ESD drop-in stuff. Are you suggesting that this doesn't work?

No, there is no bug in pulse here, I just had a bug in my packaging of
the pulseaudio-esound-compat package where I did not provide an
/etc/esd.conf file.

When this file does not exist, the *libesound* autospawning was turned
on by default which resulted in pulse being auto spawned via
/usr/bin/esd -> esdcompat

Like I say it may not be an issue on fedora's libesound if it's been
tweaked accordingly.


> Hmm, if I remember correctly: GNOME will fallback to non-cache event
> sound playback if a cached sample for the event is not cached. That
> might be the reason why event sounds still work for you, although
> nothing is in the cache.

Fair enough. Certainly the sounds are cached at login as I think I
reported back elsewhere so that's good :)

Col