'Twas brillig, and zezinho at 05/03/12 21:14 did gyre and gimble: > maybe a silly question, but what is nowadays use of soundwrapper? > > Some games still use it in the menu shortcut, while sound still works without > it for me with and without pulse... am I missing some specials configs?
It's been discussed several times on the list over the last few months, but it's still needed (or rather desirable) for now. Ultimately sound would still "work" even without pulse, but the problem comes when trying to open the sound system from multiple apps. e.g. your mail notifier may try to play an alert sound, or your desktop may try to tell you that the battery level is critial while you're playing your full-screen game. If the game uses OSS, it will get exclusive access to it when used with the ALSA OSS modules. Nowadays things work very different with PulseAudio enabled. It does not use the ALSA OSS modules but instead emulates the /dev/dsp nodes via a userspace character device emulation layer (CUSE) which in turn proxies things directly to PulseAudio. This avoids the need for soundwrapper at all and in fact the latest version of soundwrapper will be a NOP if it detects osspd as running. As I stated in mails a few weeks ago on this topic, it might make sense to drop soundwrapper in mga3 if osspd can prove to work in all cases where we want it. It would be a shame to see soundwrapper go and David has done a great job with it over the years, but if it's no longer needed then such is the way of things. Time will tell however. Col -- Colin Guthrie colin(at)mageia.org http://colin.guthr.ie/ Day Job: Tribalogic Limited http://www.tribalogic.net/ Open Source: Mageia Contributor http://www.mageia.org/ PulseAudio Hacker http://www.pulseaudio.org/ Trac Hacker http://trac.edgewall.org/
