On 12/03/2009 09:08 PM, Joshua Murphy wrote: ...
Lately, I've had zero issues with alsa pretty much configuring itself properly, given I'm using the in kernel alsa drivers for my systems... and it hasn't required any manual configuration of dmix or similar to function properly. Last time I used a separate sound daemon (aside from a short stent with Ubuntu on my netbook that, I think, had me using pulseaudio), I was running esound to manage audio from a headless box over my network... and ESD was playing nicely with other straight alsa apps on the same box...
I discovered a few weeks ago that I could completely delete all traces of arts, pulse, *and* esd, and still I can listen to a podcast from npr.org with firefox and play an mp3 using audacious at the same time. (Which drives me totally nuts, BTW, and I did it only as a test.) As you say, alsa seems to DTRT by itself these days. The only thing I'm not sure about is whether the gnome-panel volume/mixer applet is now doing what esound used to do. If you still have esound installed you can try it yourself. Just remove the arts, esd, and pulse USE flags first, then remove any/all of those packages from the machine and revdep-rebuild. It's amazing how many packages are linked against esound and AFAICT they no longer need to be. (This applies to gnome, of course.) OTOH, I haven't tested every sound-related app on my machine, so I might be missing some important exceptions.
