KDE4.4 breaks pulseaudio sound

[Duncan]

paulo posted on Fri, 19 Feb 2010 00:16:08 +0900 as excerpted:

> Just installed kde4.4, and I have absolutely no sound from kde. Kmix,
> amarok, etc, (basically all apps that use phonon) break on startup.
> Actually they don't even start.
> Even system settings will lock when I try to access the sound settings.
> 
> However the sound still works. For example, I can use mplayer a select
> alsa directly (with the -ao foo).
> 
> So this seems to be a pulseaudio bug.
> 
> Solutions? Anyone working on this?

FWIW, based on the kde3/arts and other previous "sound server" experience, 
I've always been suspicious of pulse-audio, and have never enabled it here 
(gentoo, so individual installation enabled/disabled, I've kept it firmly 
disabled).  Also, as it happens my hardware has native multi-stream 
mixing, so I've not needed it for that, but even if I did, I think I'd 
prefer alsa's own dmix or whatever it is, or just set the preferred app 
active and not worry about the others, over a sound-server solution such 
as pulse-audio.

So I've not had that issue here.

But what backend had you chosen for your kde sound output?  Will running 
something else piped directly to it (a xine based media player if it was 
xine, something gstreamer based if it was gstreamer, etc) work, or does 
that crash, too?

What about running as a different user with a clean config?  Or 
temporarily move your users homedir elsewhere so it's clean, and kde's 
starting from default system settings?  Does that fix it?  If so, it's 
something corrupted in your user settings and you can use the process of 
elimination to narrow down the corrupted config file.  If not, the system 
config itself would appear to be corrupt.

FWIW, if it's found to be in your user settings, I'd suspect it's in 
either $KDEHOME/share/apps/ or $KDEHOME/share/config/, probably in this 
case, the latter, and one of the following files: kmixctrlrc, 
phonondevicesrc, xinebackendrc (or the config file whichever backend 
you've chosen), or possibly systemsettingsrc.  Those are the ones I'd try 
first, anyway.  ($KDEHOME will normally be either ~/.kde or ~/.kde4 by 
default, depending on your distro, I think ~/.kde is the default as 
shipped by kde.  ~ indicates your home dir, of course.)

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman

___________________________________________________
This message is from the kde mailing list.
Account management:  https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde.
Archives: http://lists.kde.org/.
More info: http://www.kde.org/faq.html.