Pasky’s Log

The joyful lives of many Linux desktop users are clouded by many packages and frameworks that are well-intentioned and try to solve real and painful problems, but which are immature, not designed in the UNIX spirit, poorly documented and most importantly, do not really have a working implementation. Oh well. I have taken the stance of patience and ascetic acceptance of the new burdens – instead of trying to purge my systems of all that is unholy and evil, I spend that time trying to debug and fix up the problems they incur (often in vain). Sometimes I even file bugs, but that can be rather… unrewarding experience – more about that at another time.

So, I have two OpenSUSE 11.2 machines – a notebook with GNOME and a workstation with KDE 4.2 and some real speakers. My notebook uses PulseAudio semi-automagically, but after many perpetual problems with pulseaudio, phonon, java and flash, I really gave up on the workstation and turned pulseaudio off. However, it is desirable to coil up in the bed and watch a movie on the notebook while NOT listening to the notebook speakers. So I want to play sound over the network, notebook to workstation.

What to do on the notebook:

$ echo default-server = $IP_of_workstation >>/etc/pulse/client.conf
$ mplayer -ao pulse ...

That was easy. Your girlfriend watches you type along over your head.

What to do on the workstation? Surely that will also be piece of cake!

$ echo load-module module-native-protocol-tcp auth-anonymous=1 >>/etc/pulse/default.pa
$ pulseaudio -v

Ok. Try to fire up mplayer and… it’s all silent! You stare at the log for a bit, then you see it:

I: sink-input.c: Created input 0 "audio stream" on alsa_output.pci-0000_01_00.1.hdmi-stereo with sample spec s16le 2ch 44100Hz and channel map front-left,front-right

But, that’s wrong! There is nothing hooked up on the HDMI! The speakers are analog. Why is it playing over the HDMI? You click around a bit, google around a bit, nothing comes up. Your girlfriend stirs impatiently.

You go through the log, see that pulseaudio first sees the HDMI sink, then the analog sink. Hm. You find the set-default-sink command somewhere and do

$ echo set-default-sink alsa_output.pci-0000_00_1b.0.analog-stereo >>/etc/pulse/default.pa

Pulseaudio restart. Nice red message:

E: main.c: Sink alsa_output.pci-0000_00_1b.0.analog-stereo does not exist

Aha! Pulseaudio sees HDMI right away, sets it up, _then_ finishes initializing and prints this error, and only about two seconds later it goes all “oh, look, there’s another card plugged in here!”. What the heck?

At this point, you either give up or try to google around again madly. After 10 minutes, while your girlfriend is browsing DeviantArt bored, sound finally comes from the speakers after you figure out to issue

pacmd  'set-default-sink alsa_output.pci-0000_00_1b.0.analog-stereo'

while having a running pulseaudio.

You will probably need to have a dbus connection to your pulseaudio if you want to do this. If you are setting up the workstation remotely, you need to either create your own dbus session or hook up to a running one if you are logged in physically as well. This is a very simple, user friendly step:

$ ps axu
...
chidori   3036  0.0  0.4 151192 16564 ?        S    09:40   0:00 kdeinit4: kded4 [kdeinit]
...
$ cat /proc/3036/environ | tr '\0' '\n' | grep DBUS
DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS=unix:abstract=/tmp/dbus-wYzWEttyro,guid=28e3a1c77f077a230071a5974be666db
$ export `cat /proc/3036/environ | tr '\0' '\n' | grep DBUS`

Yay, what a nice, user-friendly, easy to set up piece of software we have here.

(BTW, the movie stutters every two minutes or so anyway; another time I feel shiny and optimistic, I will try to figure out if using some compression for the network audio is possible nowadays.)

I spent last night fighting with Debian madness, creating a script that will automatically set up OpenVPN access to our department network on Debian Lenny machines, including NetworkManager integration, gid-based default route selection (have two firefoxes running, one for normal browsing, another for VPN browsing) and sending mails from anywhere over the VPN.

Two things took me quite some time to debug. :( I had to divert nm-openvpn-service-openvpn-helper binary in order to be able to hook up there; apparently, scripts in /etc/NetworkManager/dispatcher.d and /etc/network/ifup.d/ aren’t called during VPN setups (probably a bug fixed in newer nm versions).

Another insight taught me at least a good lesson about debconf philosophy – I spent probably *hours* trying to feed debconf my new exim4-config setup (using $DEBCONF_DB_FALLBACK, $DEBCONF_DB_OVERRIDE, debconf-set-selections, …) but dpkg-reconfigure kept ignoring them and instead rewriting the debconf database according to the old defaults. Only then it dawned to me that the defaults are actually what it has read back from /etc/exim4 and that it’s supposed to ignore whatever is in the debconf database if a corresponding configuration is available in /etc already, actually. So were I not debconf-considerate and just plainly rewrote the /etc files at the start, everything would work magically. Well, I know that I can be brutal to my Debian now. ;-)

(On a semi-related note, I’m much happier openSUSE 11.1 notebook user now that I use nm-applet instead of knetworkmanager in my KDE3 environment.)