[LAU] Installing Google Voice Chat for Linux on Fedora instead of Debian

Niels Mayer nielsmayer at gmail.com
Fri Aug 27 23:21:51 UTC 2010


Google help has another thread with advice that was developed in
parallel with my hack:
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/chat/thread?tid=273c9ff21a1bbf53
"Installing and Running Google Talk on an RPM-based system"

My current response/status/questions:
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/chat/thread?tid=273c9ff21a1bbf53&hl=en&fid=273c9ff21a1bbf5300048ed6476fb1fc
..........................
The main issues I'm now having

(1)> socket(): Address family not supported by protocol

The first socket() call emanates from the google-chat daemon/plugin
attempting to contact pulseaudio and failing, since I've disabled it
on my system. It's no biggie -- it just causes the same annoying delay
as all other gnome applications on fedora after you remove pulseaudio.
It's one of the reasons why I switched to the KDE desktop and phonon
as its handling for media is far better than Gnome -- it plays well
alongside jackd sound server used for pro audio/media work, and works
alonside pulseaudio as well. Skype also handles this much better,
resulting in no annoying pause on each audio connection.

(2)> ALSA lib pcm_dmix.c:957:(snd_pcm_dmix_open) The dmix plugin
supports only playback stream

The second line of output is a showstopper for now. The issue is that
I've got a rather interesting ALSA setup (
http://nielsmayer.com/npm/dot-asoundrc.txt ) which has my 'default'
device working as an ALSA dmix device. That and its alias plughw allow
flash and java audio applications to work nicely out of my web
browser, sending audio to a specific soundcard allocated for that
purpose.

Google-chat messes all that up. Unlike skype, which, in the absence of
pulseaudio, allows you to choose a specific card for microphone, a
separate card for speakers/playback, and optionally, a different card
or device for ringing. Which is why I'm still using skype and will
wait until I either figure out a way to hijack the google-chat
daemon's use of ALSA default device for input, or for google to put
out a proper RPM version that works as flexibly as skype "beta" for
linux version  2.1.0.47.

Of course, perhaps there's a command line option or environment
variable in the google voice daemon, or perhaps I need to investigate
what happens when I run it with some ALSA environment variables set (
http://www.alsa-project.org/main/index.php/LibEnvVars ) . I dread to
see what sort of heinosities I'lll see running with "env
LIBASOUND_DEBUG=1 google-chrome" although I guess I could just wrapper
the plugin.

LIBASOUND_DEBUG
=1 print errors to stderr, dump hw_params
=2 also assert(0)
........................

Niels
http://nielsmayer.com


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