Pulseaudio : lots of issues, how can I help?

[Colin Walters]

On Fri, Sep 12, 2008 at 4:29 PM, Jerry James <loganjerry at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 12, 2008 at 1:46 PM, Colin Walters <walters at verbum.org> wrote:
>> If you want to run terminal applications, can't you just log in to a
>> full screen gnome-terminal?
>
> I got the impression that Janina was talking about those who need
> audio to be able to login in the first place.

Probably both.  In any case, our answer is GDM and gnome-terminal.

> Those have been useful to me in a lot of circumstances that I don't
> see going away anytime soon.  Here are a few just off the top of my
> head.
>
> 1. It's late.  I'm tired.  I log out, then remember some small system
> administration task I meant to do.  Rather than wait for all the GUI
> stuff to reload as I log back in, it is much faster to switch to a
> text console, login there, do my task, then log back out.

"Login is slow" - something we know about and makes sense to fix,
rather than having an entirely different way to log in.  Another
answer is that if you hold down a magic key sequence (say
Ctrl-Shift-t) then you get just gnome-terminal.

> 2. I'm playing some game that runs at a low resolution and it crashes.
>  I don't know why, but my mouse is almost always nonfunctional
> afterwards.  When my desktop is at 320x200 and I can't use the mouse,
> regaining control is difficult.  I often switch to a text console so I
> can clean up some running programs in a nice way before I
> Ctrl-Alt-Backspace to get my X back.

First, fix the app.  Second, invest some in making the system robust
against applications that crash.  Third, land
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/CrashHandling so you don't need
to use GDB manually.

> 3. I launch some X program that consumes 100% CPU and is clearly out
> of control.  In those cases, the mouse becomes sluggish.  It can take
> a very long time to either launch a gnome-terminal or get the mouse
> over a gnome-terminal so I can click on it, have the click actually
> move the focus to that window, type the command to kill the process,
> have the typed text actually show up on the gnome-terminal, press the
> Enter key, then wait the shell to process the command.  It is MUCH
> faster to switch to a text console, login, kill the process, logout,
> and switch back to X.

I don't see that problem here with an app just burning a core.  Now if
you're in swap, obviously that's a whole other issue.