Re: [Jack-Devel] JACK in Chrome !!

On Wed, January 16, 2013 5:46 pm, Kaj Ailomaa wrote:
> On Wed, 16 Jan 2013 05:05:14 +0100, Patrick Shirkey
> <[hidden]> wrote:
>
>
>> Fedora gets this right ootb but Debian and Ubuntu packagers have made it
>> an optional manual configuration step.
>>
>
> On Debian based we achieve this with an installable pulseaudio module,
> called pulseaudio-module-jack. If you install it, pulse will autoconnect
> to jackdbus. How does Fedora do it?
>
> If you do extremem low latency work, you might not want the module active,
> as it may cause xruns. Thus, having the option to install it separately
> makes sense.
>
> I wouldn't call this manual configuration, unless you meant installing the
> module itself is manual configuration. And let's not forget that achieving
> realtime privilege already does require manual configuration on systems
> where the user is not a member of audio group, on Debian based systems.
>
>> My suggestion is to write a blog post about why Ubuntu and Debian
>> packagers don't see the obvious benefit of making pulse and jack play
>> together nicely ootb.
>>
>
> Perhaps you could explain what you mean by that here, so there is no need
> to write a blog about it.
>

On the latest Debian Wheezy (testing/experimental) pulse does not play
nicely with jack ootb. In order to get it to work I had to disable
autospawn. However it took me several hours of testing to get to the
bottom of the problem. While I was debugging the issue I found that all
the other people who had encountered the same problems as me and bothered
to put something online about their troubles had come to the conclusion
that the only way to get around the problem was to completely disable or
uninstall pulseaudio.  The predominant solution online for anyone looking
for a way to solve the problem of getting pulse to release the audio
device is to disable pulse completely.

By manual process I do mean that the user has to go out of their way to
make things work.

This is the process for enabling jack and pulse on Debian systems.

1: Add the user to the audio group
2: logout of the desktop to apply the changes to the user priviledges
3: install "pulseaudio-module-jack"
4: disable autospawn by manually editing the ~/pulse/client.conf file

    autospawn = no

5: restart pulseaudio

    pulseaudio -k
    pulseaudio -D

6: start jack

7: It may also be necessary to restart the computer after all these
changes to make sure pulse releases the device to jack. Especially if the
user as already being playing audio through pulse. This is a known bug
with pulse and dbus not releasing the device properly.

For the average user this is a relatively routine procedure but for the
n00b user these steps are daunting and challenging requiring a large
amount of background knowledge and definitely a frustrating user
experience.

With Fedora I did not have to do any of that to get jack to work for me.
However I am not sure what has happened with f17/18.




--
Patrick Shirkey
Boost Hardware Ltd

1358319646.27141_0.ltw:2,a <50524.5.12.188.139.1358319635.squirrel at boosthardware dot com>