pulseaudio cannot be removed or disabled without affecting application performance

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On Thu, 30 Apr 2009, Susan Cragin wrote:

> I can work with pulseaudio either removed or suspended, and have tried both.
> My preferred method is purge because I use speech recognition software through wine.
> For a couple of weeks, pulseaudio has not removed itself properly, making all my audio applications -- not just those that run in wine -- misbehave.

There's actually no need to purge any of the pulseaudio packages. Here's
how to disable it from a fresh Jaunty install:

1) Edit /etc/pulse/client.conf, and change "autospawn = yes" to "autospawn
= no"
2) `touch $HOME/.pulse_a11y_nostart'
3) `asoundconf list'
4) choose the desired card from the previous command's output, and use
`asoundconf set-default-card CARD', replacing CARD as appropriate
5) `killall pulseaudio'

I agree that the process is unintuitive.
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Your suggested directions are not only entirely unintuitive, step 2 didn't work.

(2) The touch command did not work. "No such file." And a visual search of my home/susan hidden files disclosed no ".pulse_ally_nostart file or similar.

(1) (3) (4) (5) worked.

Just to test, I did try running my programs in wine.
There was no change in their non-functionality.

The title for this bug should be "pulseaudio cannot be removed, disabled, suspended, killed, etc. without impairing functionality in programs that cannot work with pulseaudio, such as wine.

On 4/30/09, Susan Cragin <email address hidden> wrote:
> Your suggested directions are not only entirely unintuitive, step 2
> didn't work.
>
> (2) The touch command did not work. "No such file." And a visual search
> of my home/susan hidden files disclosed no ".pulse_ally_nostart file or
> similar.

Unless you're passing -c to touch, touch should *not* fail upon
invocation. What is the precise command you used?

You could also use:
echo something > $HOME/.pulse_a11y_nostart
as your normal, unprivileged user.

Please note that's a-one-one-why (for accessibility), not a-el-el-why.

The file does not exist by default, hence why you would want to create it.

On 4/30/09, Susan Cragin <email address hidden> wrote:
> The title for this bug should be "pulseaudio cannot be removed,
> disabled, suspended, killed, etc. without impairing functionality in
> programs that cannot work with pulseaudio, such as wine.

You are free to modify the title of the bug report.

OK, with 11 and not LL I did get it installed. And I had changed HOME to the actual name of my home file, which I should not have.
I followed all instructions, and then I re-booted.
And then I tried to run Audacity (in Linux, not in wine).
I opened the program and hit "Record." And I recorded.
I stopped the recording.
I hit "record" again, and the application stopped, and did not record.
The error message is as follows.

Latency Correction setting has caused the recorded audio to be hidden before zero.
Audacity has brought it back to start at zero.
You may have to use the Time Shift Tool (<---> or F5) to drag the track to the right place.

Basically, I think that when pulseaudio is not used -- no matter how you stop it -- something goes bad when you do exactly that sequence of events: sound input / stop / sound input.
It's the same for audacity in Linux as it is for dragon naturally speaking in wine. In DNS, during training, you dictate a short sentence to test volume, then stop it, then dictate a short sentence to test sound quality. And that second test cannot complete.