Alsa

[Prolix]

Many applications that use alsa drivers are able to share the sound output, planeshift appears not to be one. Has anyone else noticed this? It seems to me that it used to share but perhaps it is my Suse installation. Sound support in Linux is always a crap shoot, alsa is better than oss but distros never seem to optimize sound configurations being content to get basic sound working and nothing else. Has anyone had better luck with pulse or another sound system?

[khoridor]

I have to remove pulse to get any sound working on my Fedoras.
This is not a PS issue but a general one.
Basically, first program to use sound is the one that gets it; others will be silent.
Additionally, some programs initialise artsd, while some others require me to kill it.

[weltall]

openal can use your sound server, alsa or oss i've noticed that it tends to try one by one till it falls back to oss it might be that openal was improperly configured or your devices are being kept busy

[enderandrew]

PulseAudio is currently one big mess that only seems to cause problems.  If you have it (ie, you are running Ubuntu for instance) I really recommend uninstalling it.

I also recommend installing KDE and openSUSE, but that is just me.  KDE 4's multimedia system is called Phonon and it works really well.

[Debci]

yeah, kde is more stable than gnome, im ussing gnome, but i like kde.

Regards

[Prolix]

KDE4 really bugs me, I have installed it fresh on suse and mandriva and both cases fell back to 3.5x. The biggest thing that bothers me is the removable drive mounting system but the desktop keeps crashing too.

Alsa apps are supposed to be able to coexist or share a sound card but it needs to be explicitly enabled somehow within the app. Then again my problems could be the crappy AC97 onboard chipset which only gets a generic driver. Certainly if you go to the alsa site you can see lots of examples for setting up .asoundrc and modprobe.conf config files but most of that seems not to be used for modern distros. They all appear to use scripts to read files in abstracted directories such as modprobe.d. They also do not like to clearly document their specific methods.

[enderandrew]

The version of KDE 4 that shipping with openSUSE 11.1 was still a little unstable.  And the Nvidia driver at that time really caused issues with Qt because Nvidia doesn't use Xorg's API for Xrender, rather they provide their own version in the binary driver that doesn't work well.

Nvidia has since released a newer driver (with better xrender support) and KDE has had a few releases since then.

You can get weekly snapshots of KDE 4.3 trunk from this repository:

http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/KDE:/KDE4:/UNSTABLE:/Desktop/openSUSE_11.1/

The stable 4.2.1 release can be found in this repository:

http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/KDE:/KDE4:/Factory:/Desktop/openSUSE_11.1/

[Aiken]

Many applications that use alsa drivers are able to share the sound output, planeshift appears not to be one. Has anyone else noticed this?

I have noticed. I use aoss to launch psclient so other programs can still use sound.