[NBLUG/talk] Sharing sound hardware on Kubuntu?

Lincoln Peters anfrind at gmail.com
Mon Jul 5 17:21:05 PDT 2010


On Mon, Jul 5, 2010 at 12:40 PM, Kyle Rankin <kyle at nblug.org> wrote:
> Hmm, an up-to-date release of Kubuntu should be using pulse audio, and
> pulse audio should make it relatively easy to multiplex your audio from
> many different sources. Perhaps the applications they are using are trying
> to grab audio devices directly (like /dev/dsp) and aren't pulse audio
> enabled?

Aha!  I managed to isolate the problem to the Flash plug-in.
Apparently once someone does something that causes Flash to play
sound, sound is unavailable for the other user (and maybe other
applications for the same user?) until the browser closes.

Specifically, I found that if I play a Flash video on one account and
then log into the other account WITHOUT closing the browser, an error
message shows up indicating that the sound device doesn't work (it
disappeared too quickly for me to read the entire message).  If I
close the browser before logging into the second account, it has no
difficulty accessing the sound hardware.


A bit of Google searching indicates that older versions of Flash for
Linux don't use PulseAudio correctly, however upgrading to the latest
version available in the repository doesn't seem to make any
difference.  I'm not sure what's going on; the Ubuntu wiki says that
it should work for Flash 10, and that's what I have installed.


-- 
Lincoln Peters
<anfrind at gmail.com>



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