So Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy) came out, and it rocks a lot. By default it enables the pulseaudio sound server, which also rocks but has caused a few of the ‘usual suspect’ proprietary apps to fail even more than usual.
Skype
First: Skype. Skype is the bane of my existence, and judging from the way their developers rail against change on the forums, Linux users like me are the bane of theirs. No sooner had they fixed their three-year avoidance of ALSA than we all move to a new system and theirs breaks. Well, actuallyour new system was supposed to work fine with ALSA apps, except they seem to have used ALSA in a weird way, which means that when you redirect your ALSA input and output to pulseaudio, Skype just ignores it and tries to access your hardware directly. Which breaks, because pulseaudio is using your hardware.
One fix proffered on the Ubuntu forums is to make pusleaudio use ALSA’s dmix, that way your pulse apps will have this chain app->pulse->dmix->hardware,whilst broken apps like Skype can be set to use app->dmix->hardware. And this fix does make Skype work OK… but it messes up everything else like audio players because pulse-over-dmix is crappy and uses all your CPU.
So here’s my fix for broken apps, and no, it’s not ideal. Guess what? It never will be while Skype is broken!
Run the Hardy stock setup with ALSA-over-pulse, but manually run pasuspender when you need to take/make a call. I have this script which is called from a button on my panel which I press.
#!/bin/sh
# temporarily pause pulseaudio so I can use Skype or whatever
pasuspender — /usr/bin/zenity –info –text “Click OK to resume Pulseaudio”
Works OK, although you won’t hear Skype ringing.
Flash
Next up, Flash. Flash on Linux just sucks, absolutely. In Hardy, as of this moment, if you install the library that allows Flash to do audio output over pulseaudio, the Flash will crash every time you do something unusual like, say, open a frickin’ hilarious YouTube video, your browser will crash. Awesome huh! In fact, you can alleviate this by installing nspluginwrapper, in which case you will just have a gray square instead of your YouTube video. Also awesome.
My workaround for this is… just hit refresh a billion times until Flash stops sucking and plays the stupid video. It’s some sort of race condition between Flash and libflashsupport, at least that’s what the Pulseaudio developers claim. Lame!
Every Voice-over-IP App, ever
WTF guys! We all knew Pulse was coming for over a year… so why is it so hard to find a SIP client that works in Hardy? Check out my other post for listings of what’s broken about the different clients. Short answer: Linphone works well, Twinkle can be coaxed into working.