[LAU] Daemons, daemons...kill those daemons.

[Mark Knecht]

On Sun, Jun 14, 2009 at 8:15 AM, Brent Busby<brent at keycorner.org> wrote:
> Now that I've gotten a pretty clear picture of the concensus about
> PulseAudio, I wondered about some of the other (new and old) sound
> facilities in Linux, and specifically wondered if being on a system like
> Gentoo where one can turn off build-time support for these things is a
> good idea.  So...
>
>
> PortAudio:
>
> From what I can see, this doesn't do much.  It seems to provide an API
> of sorts that unifies Linux sound with sound on other operating systems.
> (For example, FreeBSD supports PortAudio, even though its an OSS-based
> system.)  Then again, I thought Alsa's OSS emulation provided a
> '/dev/dsp' that did that already.  Anyway...
>        Is this bad?  Has anyone had nearly the nightmares with
> PortAudio presence in a DAW system that's described from users of newer
> systems with PulseAudio?  I don't want to incriminate it just because
> its name is similar.  (Though I do find myself calling PortAudio
> "PulseAudio" by accident a lot.  They really could have found a better
> name for that...)
>        Gentoo has a USE flag to disable PortAudio, but I hesitate to do
> so if most of the apps these days are taking its presence as a given.  I
> don't want to diverge from what's perceived as "normal" upstream more
> than necessary to achieve good results.
>
>
> Esound ("esd"):
>
> This is truly 90's technology that won't die, and we all know that.
> The question is, how much of an assumption is it in the apps (and in the
> Gnome desktop) to the extent that if it weren't there, there would be
> problems?  Is it safe on a Gentoo system to globally ban build support
> for ESD?  Sure, Alsa has its own mixer, but will the apps just
> transparently use it if ESD isn't around?  This is really the gist of
> all my questions here:  We know there are daemons we don't like.  But
> which ones are safe to actually kill, and which ones do we still sadly
> depend on for something or other?
>
>
> Arts ("artsd"):
>
> I already have some doubts about eliminating this one, at least in any
> system that hopes to have a KDE desktop available.  Even if we don't
> need it per se, KDE seems (at least to a naive user like me) to be
> deeply wedded to it.  There are even direct mentions of artsd setup in
> some of the audio setup panels of the KDE Control Panel.  Does banning
> Artsd support equal losing all desktop audio support in KDE?  It looks
> like it might...experiences?
>
>
>
> I guess what I'm thinking is that it'd be nice to do a build in which
> everything but Alsa and Jack is banished to hell, but I'm wondering if
> that will leave some programs at a loss to find a mixer at all, and thus
> without sound.  Ideally, all sound apps, regardless of what target
> they're expecting, ought to be able to transparently find the Alsa
> mixer, and multiplex with other apps to share access with it
> simultaneously, also without special setup.
>
> Does that work?
>
> (I'd even put up with artsd if I had to, since KDE seems to assume it,
> and since it doesn't seem to cause major problems...)
>
> --
> + Brent A. Busby         + "We've all heard that a million monkeys
> + UNIX Systems Admin     +  banging on a million typewriters will
> + University of Chicago  +  eventually reproduce the entire works of
> + Physical Sciences Div. +  Shakespeare.  Now, thanks to the Internet,
> + James Franck Institute +  we know this is not true." -Robert Wilensky
> _______________________________________________
> Linux-audio-user mailing list
> Linux-audio-user at lists.linuxaudio.org
> http://lists.linuxaudio.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-audio-user
>

I have no problems running Gnome with all the old sound flags turned
off. Note that I don't have any trouble running Gnome even with
-gnome, -kde & -python although I turn those on for a few packages in
portage.use.

I don't run KDE so I cannot speak to that at all.

Hope this helps,
Mark

mark at lightning ~/Desktop $ cat /etc/make.conf
# These settings were set by the catalyst build script that
automatically built this stage
CFLAGS="-march=k8 -O2 -pipe"
CHOST="x86_64-pc-linux-gnu"
CXXFLAGS="${CFLAGS}"
MAKEOPTS="-j2"
FEATURES="parallel-fetch distclean ccache"
USE="cdda cddb realmedia quicktime dri radeon mmx mmxext sse sse2
3dnow 3dnowext -gnome -kde -esd -arts ladspa nptl nptlonly audiofile
gimp ppds usb alsa cdr dvd dvdr dvdread jack fluidsynth tcltk sndfile
v4l v4l2 mysql flac -samba i8x0 mythtv -lirc mjpeg xvid xine cjk
unicode vorbis ogg truetype java -eds -dts a52 odbci -cups -odbc
-python"
ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="amd64"
ALSA_CARDS="hdsp9652 hdsp"
VIDEO_CARDS="radeon vesa fbdev"
INPUT_DEVICES="evdev"
LINGUAS="en"
PORTAGE_NICENESS=19
EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS="--with-bdeps y"
GENTOO_MIRRORS="http://gentoo.osuosl.org/ "
SYNC="rsync://rsync.gentoo.org/gentoo-portage"
source /usr/local/portage/layman/make.conf
mark at lightning ~/Desktop $