Penultimate Reality

It’s yet another epsiode in my ever-continuing saga of switching between Linux distributions every few months. This time, I’m back to Ubuntu, and I’m running version 8.10 on all of my desktop machines. For the most part, it’s been a great experience with few problems. At this point (after a few weeks), I barely even notice the difference to my previous Gentoo setup. However, one issue just keeps driving me to the brink of insanity: the sound system.

Contrary to the experiences of most, this is one area on Linux that I’ve usually had a great experience with. My Sound Blaster Audigy card is capable of mixing several separate audio streams in hardware. No annoying blocking of the sound device. I’ve never had a need for the various software mixing solutions, such as ESD, aRts, ALSA’s dmix, and most recently, PulseAudio.

However, since switching from my well-functioning Gentoo installation to Ubuntu, it’s been just nothing but trouble. Applications using the sound system (Pidgin, mplayer, Amarok) seem to randomly freeze and need to be restarted. After having some mixer issues with mplayer, I noticed that applications seem to be using PulseAudio by default, even if I’ve configured them to use ALSA. (The default ALSA device seems to be going through PulseAudio for reasons I can’t figure out. Either that, or through some other goofy ALSA plugins. It’s definitely not going straight to the hardware, though, and whatever it’s using has its own independent mixer.) The whole thing is awfully voodoo-like. If there’s one thing I don’t like, it’s computer voodoo.

At this point, I’ve managed to make mplayer behave by forcing it to use the hardware directly (-ao alsa:device=hw=0), but that doesn’t help the other applications. Amarok, however, at least has the advantage of also having had this problem in Gentoo, so it seems more likely to be a bug in Amarok, xine, or even the audio driver.

So, it seems that I have little need for PulseAudio at all, but since it’s depended on by the ubuntu-desktop package (which I prefer to keep installed), it’s not going anywhere. It’s issues like this that make me want to run back to Gentoo, despite shortcomings of its own.

It’s always something, isn’t it. A bug-free environment would just be too much to ask.

I’m currently the owner of an old Thinkpad 760ED, a very old laptop. For comparison purposes, it has a 133Mhz Pentium processor and 48 megabytes of RAM. It’s certainly not high-powered, but might be good for something. I have no idea what.

Long story short, a couple of years ago, I managed to install Gentoo on the thing, and it ran fine (for some definition of fine–it was difficult to compile anything, as I had set it up using another computer to compile binary packages). A couple of days ago, I decided to revive it and install Debian on it, since that would be marginally more effective. (It’s run Debian before.) Unfortunately, the Debian install CD was refusing to recognize the hard drive and CD-ROM drive.

Eventually, I discovered that I had to manually modprobe the ide-generic module. My, that’s inconvenient. In any case, Debian’s happily installing now (over the blisteringly fast 115.2k serial link, no less). There are plenty of other quirks about using this laptop, but I should probably save them for some sort of book on the horrors of buying IBM. At least I got the thing for free.