DogHouse

Tech stuff follows:

I did a clean install of Ubuntu LTS 8.04 code named Hardy Heron as soon as it was released.  When will I learn to wait?  I have an older computer and I really don’t need to keep up with the latest and greatest.  I listen to music, read the news, email and do some web searches.  I could live with a "live" CD for that matter.

 After having to jump through hoops many times, I got the sound cobbled together.  Every time something updated it seemed to break the sound pipeline. Frustrating, that!  I decided to start fresh last night.

Late last night, I did a clean install of Hardy Heron.  I kept the repositories to the default safe sources.

Pulse-audio is the new thing for Ubuntu and Fedora.  Pulse-audio is the future of sound on Linux.  Over my last five years of running Linux I have been amazed at how hard sound on Linux has been.

I have the built-in Intel sound card (hw card 0)and a Sound-Blaster Audigy CA0106 7.1 Live! sound card (hw card 1).

When I opened Firefox for the first time I allowed Hardy to look for codecs and helpers.  For flash I chose the open source swfDec helper.  

For Audacious I chose the Ugly Gstreamer 010 set as reccomended by the search for applicable sound codec dialog.

Now I can listen to Audacious play my music library, hear a "clink" sound when I push a control button and listen to sound from a YouTube video at the same time.  Audio heaven.

I still feel strongly that Linux will not gain acceptance until all this works right after the install.  This is my opinion and I could be wrong.

cat /proc/asound/cards
 0 [ICH5           ]: ICH4 - Intel ICH5
                      Intel ICH5 with AD1981B at irq 21
 1 [CA0106         ]: CA0106 - CA0106
                      Live! 7.1 24bit [SB0410] at 0xb800 irq 22

Some of my sound config files.

******* default-sink

alsa_output.pci_1102_7_sound_card_0_alsa_playback_0

***** default-source

alsa_output.pci_1102_7_sound_card_0_alsa_capture_0

 ***** volume-restore.table

pulsecore/protocol-native.c$totem-audio-preview
2 65536 65536
alsa_output.pci_8086_24d5_sound_card_0_alsa_playback_0

pulsecore/protocol-native.c$totem-plugin-viewer
2 65536 65536
alsa_output.pci_8086_24d5_sound_card_0_alsa_playback_0

pulsecore/protocol-native.c$Audacious
2 57776 57776
alsa_output.pci_1102_7_sound_card_0_alsa_playback_0

pulsecore/protocol-native.c$Totem Movie Player
2 65536 65536
alsa_output.pci_8086_24d5_sound_card_0_alsa_playback_0

pulsecore/protocol-native.c$PulseAudio Volume Meter

alsa_output.pci_1102_7_sound_card_0_alsa_playback_0.monitor

The configuration files in /etc/pulse seem to be the standard example files. I made no changes to those files.

There is NO asoundrc file in /etc 

*******/home/art/.asoundrc

 #  I want to use the second card (card 1)

pcm.ca0106 {
          type hw
          card 1
       }
      
       ctl.ca0106 {
          type hw
          card 1
       }
**********************************

Lesson learned:  Keep it simple and it works.

Cheers